It is 42 years since the launch of the Jaguar E-Type, the first production car advertised as being capable of 150mph. Which begs a question: if we can drive around at 150mph why aren't we?

Well, of course, some of us are but we're breaking the law and if we keep doing it for long enough we will eventually be caught and banned. But what if it weren't against the law? And what if motorways were privately owned - run for profits not votes? What then? Imagine, to paraphrase Rachel Lucas, no safety fascists. What would stand in our way then?

I think it is a worthwhile question because if we could bomb around in our automobiles it would go a long way to putting certain debates to rest. For instance, it would throw the case for taxpayer-funded high-speed rail lines straight out of the window. One should bear in mind that although TGVs have a top-speed of 186mph, by the time you have factored in the time for acceleration, station stops, speed restrictions and the extra journey time to and from the station, door to door they are not actually that much faster, if at all, than a 150mph car.

Trains, in fact provide us with one of the potential problems. On conventional tracks, using conventional technology and above 125mph, travelling on a train gets pretty uncomfortable. Passengers get hurled around every time the train rounds a bend. The solution is to either build new, straighter lines, as they have in France and Japan, or to make the trains tilt, as they to in Italy and soon will in the UK. As roads do not seem any less curvy than railways, this would presumably be a problem for high-speed roads.

But would there be others? Were I, through CrozierRoad, to build a high-speed road I would want it to be just that: high speed. I would definitely not want to find my Ferrari-driving customers baulked by mobile chicanes in the form of puny Ford Focuses. One solution might be to use the price mechanism to keep the road sufficiently free that 150mph an hour would be a racing certainty but that would be a rule of thumb matter. If, on the other hand, I introduced a minimum speed of, say, 130mph, how would I enforce it?

I suppose there is another question here. Are there enough cars around that can do these speeds? If there aren't what is the constraint? Is it technology, in that building a 150mph car is actually a rather expensive thing to do or is it the existing law which has rendered high-speed motoring more or less impossible?

There is one more question here. What about accidents? CrozierRoad is not going to want accidents - they're bad for business. In that case, are high-speed roads likely to be any more accident-prone than conventional roads. If so, what sorts of measures might have to be introduced?

Update 10/05/04

Highway has some comments on the technical side.