Randal O^Toole, a Senior Fellow of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington DC▸ , says it all.
Whist it maybe possible it's implementation to every road and vehicle would make the cost of HS2▸ look trivial. Of course from the libertarian point of view they would say you can buy the car and presummably pay Google to drive it with your own money, so no public money involved.
Another way of looking at it we still have problems controlling a few trains on fixed routes, i.e. today's failures at Maidenhead. How you control millions of autonomous cars not on fixed tracks is quite a large systems problem. Until every car is fitted how do you prevent cars with drviers still hitting other cars whether with drivers or not?
At least a signal failure doesn't kill anyone.
Yes, I think safety is the big omission from his argument.
But would you be surprised to find the Mail's headline was not really based on
the original article? Thought not. Though the link with HS2 wasn't the Mail's invention - it seems to have come from Forbes Magazine, of all places.
O'Toole does say new transit schemes should be scrapped, but says nothing (in this article) about intercity rail projects. (He has elsewhere, though.) He does not mention Europe, either, but he does say this:
In reality, this is a big country, and urban and suburban areas occupy such a small portion of it that they are no threat to other land uses. The 2010 census found that only about 3 percent of the nation^s land, or less than 70 million acres, has been urbanized, including all cities and suburbs in urban areas of 2,500 people or more.
which I suspect even he wouldn't claim applies here, at least to anything like the same extent.
He's been saying much the same as this for decades, and of course the Cato Institute is a "libertarian think tank". These are not exactly rare in Washington, forming the academic wing of the tea-party movement, perhaps? But generally held views in America on things like personal liberty versus other objectives (like fairness or social solidarity), and on risk and personal responsibility, are different from here. So in an American context what he says might be more realisable than you think.
His main point is that outside a few very dense urban areas like New York, "rail transit" is more notable for the money it spends than the passengers it carries. The numbers do support that, too. He's particularly rude about Portland Oregon, often called (with reason) "the most European of American Cities". That could indicate a real difference between Europe and America. Then again, it may be because he grew up in Portland and still lives there.
