More doubts about driverless cars

Forgive me for mentioning driverless cars again. But this is relevant because transport ministers and other politicians, such as Philip Hammond and Lord Adonis, keep referring to them as a potential alternative to the railways.

The death of a pedestrian in Arizona who was run over by a driverless car in autonomous mode (although there was an operator who could have intervened) highlights the fact that this technology is unlikely ever to deliver the promised safety benefits, and that it is nowhere near being able to handle all the difficulties encountered by human drivers every moment they are at the wheel.

Of course, thousands of people are killed by cars every day (the worldwide figure is 3,200 daily), and we should be doing everything to reduce that terrible toll.

But jumping to an untried technology which has all sorts of other undesirable consequences, such as putting hundreds of millions of people out of work, is not the solution.

As the massive progress in rail safety in recent years has shown, it is possible to make best use of existing technologies and to work at human factors in order to improve safety and reduce accidents.

Arguing that we need to wait until driverless cars come on stream is a smokescreen that will prevent proper safety measures being implemented now.