A journey towards the future

What will the roads of tomorrow be like?

Reading time: 9 min

Safety, technological innovation, and respect for the environment are the three pillars that will pave the roads we will be driving on in the coming years.

Driving in Spain today is much more comfortable and safer than it was decades ago. This has a lot to do with the increase in highways and improvements to both the layout and the road surface, which now drain rainwater and better withstand heat.

The next step in their evolution will come from new technologies, which will allow us to access all kinds of the information on roads in real time, reuse asphalt, and even provide more sustainable energy for vehicles.

A step towards "smart" roads

One of the factors that will contribute most to the improvement of roads is undoubtedly the deployment of new technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and big data, which will soon — if they haven't already — become an active part of our journeys. Their name says it all: smart roads.

In just a few years from now, roads will be connected to our vehicles, whose navigation systems will receive information about all the possible incidents on their planned route. There will also be sensors installed on the asphalt itself, which will report on the traffic situation and even be able to detect potential structural damage to the roads, which will be reported to highway engineers to help speed up maintenance work.

Self-repairing roads

The unique characteristics of these new roads will make them smoother and safer to drive on, and they'll last longer.

At the moment, there are over 30 million vehicles circulating each year on the more than 165,000 kilometers of national road network, leading to considerable wear and tear on the asphalt and requiring administrations to devote considerable resources to upkeep them.

That’s why the priority in coming years is to extend asphalt’s useful life and even create self-repairing pavements such as the joint solution developed by Repsol and Acciona. They developed a mixture in which the asphalt practically "heals" itself, thanks to the use of rejuvenating agents, which are released when small cracks occur. Another of their technological developments even makes it possible to reuse asphalt already worn out by the constant passage of vehicles and severe weather to make new mixtures, which will help reduce the amount of asphalt that ends up in landfills.

Another option being considered is the use of a material that is 200 times stronger than steel and also lighter than aluminum: graphene. Towards the end of last year, the UK government announced it would be testing out graphene on a section of the country's A1 road.

Towards more sustainable mobility

In just a few years' time, cars, and trucks on the road will be powered by various, more sustainable energy sources such as biofuels, synthetic fuels, hydrogen, and electricity. These energy solutions will be complementary as using one or the other will depend on the user's mobility needs and how far they need to travel, for example.

Biofuels (those produced from raw materials of biological origin) and synthetic fuels or e-fuels (those made from CO₂ captured from the atmosphere and renewable hydrogen) "are a real and available solution for reducing emissions immediately, which will be essential for decarbonizing all transportation sectors, especially those that require traveling long distances," explains Miguel Ángel García Carreño, process development manager at Repsol Technology Lab. He adds, "their chemical composition is very similar to conventional fuels, making them fully compatible with existing vehicles with combustion engines, which avoids the need to develop new technologies and makes it possible to take advantage of the extensive network of distribution and refueling infrastructures already in place.

Interconnected cars and roads sharing information, self-repairing asphalt, and ultra-fast charging points will all be part of the road landscape in only a few years.

In terms of electric cars, in the years to come, it will be necessary to deploy an extensive network of recharging points that's comprehensive and strategically placed, allowing drivers to recharge their batteries in much the same way as traditional refueling. As such, Repsol opened a new ultra-fast EV charging facility at the beginning of 2022 on the A-1 highway passing through Venturada, in the Community of Madrid. It has four 350-kW charging points, where electric vehicles can be recharged in around 5-10 minutes.

At the same time the network of charging points is expanding, the sector is working on developing other innovative solutions, such as electromagnetic induction technology, which involves burying electromagnetic cables under the asphalt. The strong electromagnetic fields will be received by a vehicle and converted into electrical energy.

This technology has already been tested in Europe. An example is the Swedish project, eRoadArlanda, which has been working for many years on converting roads into energy sources for electric vehicles, specifically a two-kilometer stretch between Arlanda airport and Stockholm. Another project is "Elisa," led by Siemens in Germany, which allows a network of hybrid trucks to be connected to an overhead powerline on the highway and draw electric power to charge the batteries that power them.

There is no doubt that the journey towards the future of roads began a long time ago. All these projects confirm that the priority for the coming years will be creating roads that are more environmentally friendly and adapted to drivers and pedestrians’ needs. In terms of road design, it is no longer only the vehicle being considered, environmental sustainability also plays a key role. What's the main objective? To improve people’s quality of life.

_{Published in La Vanguardia}