I hate driving to work, it pisses me off, the whole ritual seems so outdated. Mass transit also is lame, I don't want to spend time driving to bus station or train station or metro station. I want to be in my car and just going faster. Current highways technology is completely unacceptable. Highway travel is dangerous, it's slow and terribly inefficient. The technology I'd love to see during my lifetime is automated highways. If responsibility for the operation of cars is taken away from people and given to machine, we could improve safety, and arrival times.
Of course to avoid massive technology vulnerabilities cars must be responsible for their own movements, no giant high speed conveyor belts. I think an automated highway would look very similar to our current highways. The only visible difference would be cars would move much faster, and they would automatically rearrange themselves to accommodate people getting on and off the highway in kind of a synchronized swimmer-esque dance. Of course cars will still break down from time to time or hit some a deer or something but with the automated highway system there will be no dangerous and time consuming rubbernecking. All cars would share their speed and location information with each other which would improve emergency driving situations.
Of course there would be little incentive to develop this complicated and expensive technology in cars if there is no infrastructure to support it. This is why transportation technology changes so little over time. Automated cars don't seem to be a completely unreasonable hope. I bet this technology will be created for something random and then used for this. And once automated highways are available, everyone will think they are cool, the government will force us to use them, the speed limits will be adjusted to take advantage, and all will be wonderful.
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