Trying to make sense of highways and transport in the UK

摘要

I have a vague memory of a novel I read as a kid. It had a futuristic description of a machine that automatically scrapes up, recycles and replaces a plastic road surface in one operation. I might be misremembering the book, but it has got me thinking about what highway maintenance might look like decades from now and what role humans might have in the sector. At the moment, we collect lots of data about the condition of our highway asset, and management software is allowing us to manipulate it to help us prioritise maintenance interventions and methods. As artificial intelligence gets more intelligent, will the computers surpass engineering judgement to the point where the maintenance engineer is no longer needed? Will we usher in a new world of autonomous machines, which can deal with the cyclical work of gully cleansing, or robots that can swap out damaged luminaires from our connected street lighting systems?