Imagine a time when the road and the car work together.
When Canadian highways of tomorrow will have super-productive lanes, filled to capacity with maximum payloads, inundated with wayside electric power stations.
Now imagine all this to be done without using additional urban space, allowing vehicles to run in super-productive rights-of-way shoehorned into existing roadways or above them.
This is the Intelligent Vehicle Highway System or IVHS for short. In the works now for over thirty years. Industry being a bit too pushy, aggressively introducing us to new high tech gadgetry for existing vehicles and an ageing highway system. The original supporters of IVHS were pushed aside in favour of keeping the old highways systems as they already were. Of course, they increased capacities of the highways, (GPS, gas mileage, faster cars etc.) Million and millions are spent for non-recurring delays, such as alerts on accidents further ahead. Nothing on bottlenecks that reoccur over and over in different places along the same route. These areas are called "chokepoints" and occur everywhere, bridge crossings, tunnels. Everyone now-a-days can hear about possible delays via the radio.
The IVHS has the advantage of a promise, Hands-Free-Driving, with Close-Interval Operation; meaning this system will allow drivers to follow one another, inches apart at race neck speed, without causing accidents. Thus increasing road capacity.
Soon, we all be using the Robotic trucks, to deliver goods at race-neck speed, at full capacity, in their own close-interval lanes, manless, and fully computerized, running adjacent to regular traffic.
The days of driving alone in gas guzzling touring cars on failing highway infra-structures are over, lets welcome and embrace the new, Intelligent Vehicle Highway System, eh?
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