delusionofgrandeur

Quite honestly, using a motorway in the UK at peak times these days is not much fun.

Generally speaking you’re likely to sit in stop/start traffic and use substantially more fuel than if the road was clear while take an eternity to get to your destination.With the appliance of just a little technology, this could be made so much better.

Motorways are designed to be carefully controlled systems and if everything happened as it was designed to, they would work well. The trouble is, adding just one thing breaks the system: Human beings.

Human beings driving on motorways tend to be both selfish and stupid. They drive with excessive speed, fail to use proper lane discipline and ‘tailgate’ other drivers causing sudden braking and wave-effects in the traffic flow. They also crash. Badly.

I suggest then that the motorways are an ideal place for the application of modern technology. What we need is the ‘Motorway Autopilot’.

The moment you join the entry slip road at peak time, your car’s autopilot would take over control of throttle, gears, brakes and steering. As you arrive at the filter point, the other vehicles, also all controlled by autopilot would already have made a gap just 10 feet longer than your car into which you would slot yourself.

As your car is a lightweight, lightly laden car with performance sufficient to handle any gradient found on the motorway network, another gap would form in lane 2 for you and then another in lane 3. Once in lane three, you would find yourself moving with other vehicles of the same class and loading at 60mph. The car ahead would be just 5 feet away and the one behind just as close. Packing the vehicles in so tightly would allow many more vehicles to use the motorway without causing a complete standstill.

Despite only travelling at 60mph, you would arrive at your destination sooner than in the ‘bad old days’ before autopilots simply due to the free flowing traffic. This reduced speed helps to reduce pollution while the removal of the human-induced speed oscillations reduces pollution further. The reduced speed also allows leeway for the vehicles to make small adjustments to speed to allow traffic to filter between lanes.

Obviously, emergencies would have to be handled carefully by the system but even then, the autopilot would be a great help. Mechanical failures could would be trivial.

Let us say your car, travelling along in the tightly bunched traffic of lane 3 suddenly blows out a tyre. No problem!

1. Sensors on your vehicle register the blowout and immediately inform the motorway network.
2. Within a fraction of a second traffic in lanes 1 and 2 and behind you in lane 3 begin heavy braking.
3. Your car’s normal Electronic Stability Program, coupled to the Motorway Autopilot expertly guides you across the now wide open gap in lanes 1 and 2 to the hard shoulder.
4. The motorway network sends out a recovery vehicle to you automatically while immediately instructing the autopilots of the vehicles which slowed for you to accelerate back to normal cruising speed.

Even emergencies such as foreign objects falling into the road could be handled with little drama as the vehicles could perform controlled emergency stops without risk of pile-ups.

The system could be extended further to eliminate the full-time hard-shoulder and automatically and efficiently force all traffic across one lane in the event a vehicle breaks down.

Just think, you could go to sleep on the M40, not kill yourself and arrive in London in about an hour and a half with your own car.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Automotive, General, Ramblings.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.