Road transport

People travel more and more every year, enhancing the role of the transport industry. We travel short and long distances more frequently and impose more stringent requirements on the speed, comfort and cost efficiency of our journeys. In Russia, road transport has traditionally ensured the unity of our immense country, although there has not been much change in the industry in the past decade. Nevertheless, global competition will force Russia to adopt new methods of road construction and transport management.
Intelligent systems are becoming an essential part of transport infrastructure, both in terms of traffic management and vehicle control. Computers are taking over logistics. Unmanned vehicles will soon appear on the roads, safer and more predictable than traditional ones. According to Google estimates, they will bring about a 90% reduction in the number of road accidents, fuel expenses and overall traffic volume, as well as allow the driver to read a book or watch a movie instead of having to watch the road all the time.
Materials and surfaces are becoming intelligent, along with the hardware: adaptive road surfaces (equipped with sensors and solar panels), lightweight heavy-duty structures and high-tech lining for vehicles and carriages are already in use. Smart roads will replace map-making services by directly transmitting information about the traffic situation ahead (jams, ice, accidents, etc.) to drivers. This will enable more effective route planning and timely decision making. It is an ideal solution, taking into account the anticipated proliferation of unmanned vehicles.
The state of Virginia (USA) already has its own Virginia Smart Road, equipped with a lighting control and weather monitoring system, sensors tracking humidity, temperature, vibration and weight of cars passing by. The length of the experimental section is just 3.5 km, but there are plans to extend it to 9.2 km.
Movement speed is increasing, especially in railway transportation, which allows it to compete with aviation at short distances. The fastest train in the world today is the Japanese JR Maglev magnetic levitation train that can cover a distance of 581 km in an hour. The innovative train is undergoing testing on an experimental 18 km section, which will become part of a high-speed line from Tokyo to Osaka in the future. There are also various alternative projects and ideas for the transport industry. Russia, for example, is working on a string transport project, a transportation system where light carriages will move on thin “string” rails stretched between supports. Trains in the system will be able to move at speeds of up to 500 km/h. For example, a journey from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod will only take an hour, and a trip from Moscow to Saint Petersburg will last only an hour and a half. In turn, entrepreneur Ilon Mask, who founded the first privately owned space company SpaceX, is planning to build a “hyperloop”, a passenger transportation system where people would travel in small capsules inside a low pressure pipeline. According to his estimates, the average speed of a capsule in the system will exceed 900 km/h.