Transport Secretary vision for self-drive cars undermined by poor UK road network

The Transport Secretary’s autonomous car vision as outlined in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme could be undermined by poor road surfaces needing ongoing, unplanned repair and maintenance warns Britpave, the infrastructure trade association.

Speaking on the programme, Mark Harper told guest editor James May, the former Top Gear presenter, that autonomous cars could be rolled out as early as 2026. He said: “The legislation is going through Parliament at the moment so hopefully we’ll get that through by the end of 2024. Probably by as early as 2026, people will start seeing some elements of these cars that have full self-driving capabilities being rolled out.”

Asked if people will be able to travel in self-driving vehicles “with your hands off the wheel, doing your emails” in 2026, Mr Harper replied: “Yes, and I think that’s when companies are expecting – in 2026, during that year – that we’ll start seeing this technology rolled out.”
Benefits of self-driving vehicles include less accidents, improved use of road space, reduced congestion and pollution and more efficient fuel consumption. The vehicles would be equipped to ‘read the road’ and replicate the instinctive human ability to simultaneously observe, analyse, decide and react to every potential different road scenario such as potholes and reduced skid resistance.

However, self-driving vehicles need well-maintained road surfaces. Surface friction levels, road markings and signs must be in good condition in order to be correctly read by the vehicles’ sensors. Embedded wi-fi antenna for vehicle connectivity needs to be protected from damaged caused by rutting from heavy traffic loads or the road surface melting in extreme temperatures. Such robust, long-term road surfaces are not a given feature of the current UK road network.

Joe Quirke, Britpave chairman, explained: “The technological advancement of self-driving vehicles needs to be matched by investment in long-term, robust road solutions. The current road network is simply not up to the job.”

In particular, Quirke pointed to the fact that, unlike human drivers who may slightly shift left or right within lanes, self-driving vehicles guided by GPS and other navigational aids will follow and keep to a far more precise path. This means that each self-driving vehicle will drive over the same part of the road each time leading to significant repetitive wear-and-tear and increased ongoing maintenance. He said: “To counteract this, roads will have to provide far more long-term robustness than they do at present. They will also have to have far more built-in climate resilience if they are to continue to operate during the extreme weather events predicted as a result of climate change.”

Concrete roads, that are already currently designed for a performance life of 60 years, offer the required levels of long-term strength and resilience. This long term performance reduces the financial cost and the carbon cost of ongoing short-term maintenance or replacement.

He observed: “Concrete roads offer the robustness and resilience to withstand repetitive traffic loads as well as the structural integrity to support and protect installed sensors and wi fi antenna. A self-driving vehicle will only be as good as the road surface that it drives on. We need a road solution that provide a long-term solution that comes with built-in whole life cost and CO2 reduction benefits.

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