A Place to Stand

If our housing industry could learn from automobiles imagine how much railways can. Because access to rail is centrally controlled, even when in the private sector, it is less open to technological change & you can see that railway carriages now are pretty similar to how they were a century ago while cars are completely different.

What modern automated rail systems there are tend to be newly built. Docklands Light rail shows what can be done.
with small units similar to buses in style & weight & without needing drivers. The weight bit matters not just because a heavy train uses more energy moving a passenger than a lighter bus but also because the amount of traffic a line can carry depends much more on the weight of units than on the number of them. Thus the reason why cars can drive nearly bumper to bumper & trains are, at best, 10 minutes apart is because the weight means the track can't do better & stopping distances are so very long.

Driverlessness is being seen even for cars & trains are obviously an infinitely less complex system. Docklands is only 1 of many driverless systems worldwide. & it is only a matter of time till some nation moves from automated new systems to automating the old systems as well.

Ultimately it is perfectly possible to have a countrywide rail system with single carriage units (bus sized or ultimately even taxi sized)leaving every few minutes, all day & indeed night. This would be cheaper to run yet able to carry many more passengers with a wider range of destinations, with little waiting time at stations. Such a system would be a genuine competitor, indeed usually superior, to car travel. You could buy a ticket at John O' Groats for Landsend with perhaps 2 or 3 5 minute changes, far faster & for less cost than the equivalent (if there were an equivalent) bus. Indeed for a bit more you could take an automated taxi. The ease of moving containers is also obvious.