Tales of Future Past v2

Tomorrow's cars would be pretty useless without tomorrow's highways.  Sure, you've got an aluminium bullet of a motor car crammed with every convenience and contrivance known to modern man, but that won't get you very far if your wonder car has to navigate over dirt roads with the cross section of a wash board and speed limits designed around aging plough horses. This is a bit of a problem if you've set your heart on making the motor car one of the totem's of Future Past, so it's small wonder that as the car of tomorrow emerged, so did plans for the highway of tomorrow.

It isn't hard to imagine what yesterday's vision of the highways of tomorrow were; that's because we live with those visions every day whenever we travel on the Autobahn, or the M1, or I90, or even the more recently built city streets. Today, we're used to seeing long, straight motorways with gentle, inclined curves, multiple lanes to accommodate cars travelling at different speeds, on and off ramps, centre dividers, and overpasses and clover leafs replacing intersections. They're the commonplace of highway engineering and we take them for granted.  But after the First World War, such ideas were revolutionary and proposals to cover entire nations and even continents with such systems were as visionary as putting a man on the Moon.

The thing is, roads are different from machines, vehicles or buildings. You can build even the largest building in a matter of months and they're expected to last for only a few decades at most, but when a road is laid down, it's there for centuries, if not millennia.  Take a spin on Watling Road in England and you're motoring where Caesar's legions once marched. It also takes decades to build a road network and today even projects like the American Interstate system or the British motorways are still being built over  half a century since the first ground was broken.

Small wonder that the roadways of tomorrow have bumped into those of today – or even of yesterday, as the old dreams run smack into today's needs, such as Birmingham's notorious Spaghetti Junction, Los Angeles's permanent tailbacks, and the M25's 21st  century roads stuck with 1940s bridges.

We tend to think of the highway of tomorrow as all multilane freeways, great sweeping bridges, and futuristic architecture, and though there was all that, a lot of the planning by people like Norman Bel Geddes revolved around rethinking how a road actually works; how to make it more than a strip of tarmac with a couple of signs at the crossroads.  Highway designers of the '30s compared the roads of those days to a car that had been stripped of all its accessories; it might be able to run, but it would be uncomfortable and unsafe.  In those days, even something as basic as  cat's eyes or standardised road signs were unknown.  If motoring was going to be fast, safe, and pleasurable, then the highway engineers would have to do for  the road what car designers did for the family runabout.

Some of the ideas were simple and obvious things like proper lane markings, improved signage, and installing mirrors on blind hilltops and corners.  Some were more ambitious, such as the hydraulic lane dividers used in Chicago  that can be raised and lowered to alter the number of lanes available to cars going in one direction or the other.  Others were as interesting as they were impractical, such as road-level street lighting that would turn on when a car approached and off after it past.  These did double duty as dispensers for de-icing chemicals in the winter. Later versions suggested microwaves

If the thought of tyre-toasting roads seems a bit out there, then consider the idea of turning the road into a giant phonograph that speaks traffic warning as you roll over it.  Presumably, you can also gauge your speed depending on whether the voice sound like Orson Welles or Alvin and the Chipmunks.

By 1960, imagined the designers of the 1930s , the motorways of the future would be incredible, continent-spanning networks that would be self-illuminating, self-de-icing, and carrying traffic at average speeds of 100 MPH.  Whether it used clover leafs or long, curving feeder lanes, intersections would be a thing of the past and even city traffic would run with smooth efficiency as pedestrian traffic was raised to upper level walkways and freight relegated to lower level tunnels.  

The highways themselves would be colourful affairs with different hues of plastic coating telling the driver which lane was which.   Some lanes would even be reserved for new hovercars or specialised vehicles for urban commuters.

The cities themselves would change, much as they did in reality, with dense urban centres giving way to developments spread over the countryside to provide open air and greenery to the inhabitants.

For all the grand engineering and careful planning, there was a limit to how much the roads could be improved and as early as the 1930s the biggest limiter was recognised as the motor car itself.  It was one thing to make the roads safer, faster, and more efficient, but the car had to keep pace as well.  Streamlining into aluminium spaceships helps, of course, as do things like more safety features, such as anti-collision radar and more efficient power plants, but the one component that we still haven't been able to perfect is the nut behind the wheel.  If only there was some way to get the car to drive itself, then the job would be so much easier.

And why not?  Even in the '30s aeroplanes could practically fly themselves in a spot of good weather.  So could ships equipped with gyro compasses and automatic pilots.  Unfortunately, it turns out that the sky and the ocean are a lot less complex than even the best built highway and simple autopilots in cars would lead to complicated crashes.

But that didn't stop designers of the 1930s from coming up with ideas like the "automatic beam control", which would control cars on the highways of tomorrow through radio beams from control towers or bridges over the highway that would regulate speed, distance between cars, and automatically control  lane changes.

it was a great idea, but hampered by that tiny detail that no one had invented a radio beam device.  By the 1950s, this had been discarded by General Motors in favour of a system that used wires embedded in the road to control their turbine-powered Firebirds.

So, how about letting the driver do the actual driving, but giving him up to the minute information?  That seemed like a logical and more practical alternative while the engineers sorted out beam controlling.  Transmit information like traffic density, safe speeds, weather conditions, etc. to the car of tomorrow from the highway of tomorrow.  You could use lamp posts as radio aerials; that sort of thing.

It was a very good idea and we have something like it today with our GPS and the like, but it's not a very good thing to base a highway system on and it showed up a fatal flaw in the beam control idea as well.  Designers recognised that systems that controlled or transmitted information to cars depended on the cars being standardised.  One heterodox or faulty  car in the system would be a menace.  Devices relying on photocells to light up lane dividers and the like were more practical because they don't require any modifications to the machine.



If all else fails, eliminate the driver all together by introducing something like the roller highway  from 1961.

We have a similar system today.  We call it the train.



Finally, eliminate both the road and the train with the Transdrive system that looks like the unholy marriage of a ski lift and a Scalextric set.   Installing the funnel thing  to catch the riding hook was easy part.  Explaining to the car owner that his roof was torn off because cars aren't designed to be picked up like dinky toys is the hard part.

Asking how convertibles were supposed to use this just caused the inventor to wander off and sulk.

Previous/Next