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The Messina solution

There is a joke about two prisoners who we quickly discover are from the idiots’ town because to escape they have made two holes in the wall.

It is not a similar stupidity to make motorways with two lanes for each direction when only one can absorb all the traffic? Evidently, wide motorways are not made by stupidity, but to make overtaking possible. But to continue that custom now we are in the 21st century would be stupid.

Let’s think about a current section of motorway, with a traffic average of one vehicle every 10 seconds during the day. 90 per cent of vehicles drive in the inside lane and the rest in the outside one when overtaking. A single lane would absorb all this traffic without difficulty if all the vehicles went at the maximum allowed velocity and overtaking did not exist. It is possible that in certain sections surrounding large cities, where wider motorways, with three or more lanes in each direction are currently required, two lanes would be necessary to support such intense traffic, but in the great majority of all the kilometres of motorway one lane in each direction would be enough if there were no overtaking.

Overtaking is carried out for two reasons: because there are vehicles slower than others, and because there are drivers slower than others. Both reasons will be annulled by the computerization of transport. The network, as a single brain, will drive every vehicle at the maximum allowed velocity on each section. Those vehicles incapable of travelling at such speed will be repaired, reformed or retired. Any equivalent to the current lorries will not exist, because freight will move separately in specific narrow conduits.

Any cable or conduit through which a current flows is suitable for an established intensity the narrower it is. The road does not constitute an exception to this law. Narrowness means a lower cost of the materials that form the conduit and less occupied space. We may think about the waste that would be involved if electrical, telephone and computer cables, as well as the pipes for water, gas or the sewage system, and also the oil pipelines, had to be double the width to achieve the same service. Conversely, let’s imagine the space saved in cities and fields, plus the money saved on works if the motorways were half their width.

Computerized transport will solve the old challenge of the Straits of Messina with the only method not considered throughout the megalomaniac 20th century. The problem of constructing a bridge to connect the Italian peninsula with the island of Sicily through the Straits of Messina is that the sea is too deep there to erect intermediate pillars and too wide to build a gigantic bridge which hangs between the two points.

Computerized transport may not be able to reduce the width of the strait, but it can lighten the route: a single lane of light vehicles in each direction, that is to say, one vehicle after another, not one vehicle next to the other. The solution of Messina is a bridge equal in length, but ten times lighter than the bridges planned in the 20th century for a motorway and a double train track.

In fact, the Messina solution is the generalized solution of the 21st century.

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