You wouldn’t want to say it out loud on the concourse of King’s Cross at 8am on a Monday morning, but the British commuter is profoundly lucky. Bothered by the invasion of your personal space? In Tokyo 70 per cent of schoolgirls told one survey that they had been abused on the city’s preposterously overstuffed subways by chikan, suited fetishists who spray teenagers with mayonnaise and worse. The vice has bred its own genre of pornography, norimono poruno.

Fed up with exorbitant fares? One of the first season tickets issued in mid-Victorian Britain cost £50, a year’s wages for the average worker of the day. It sold out anyway. Bored of plasticky food? Victorian commuters endured famously awful railway sandwiches — “the real disgrace of England”, according to Anthony Trollope — and what Charles Dickens called “a class of soup which enfeebles the mind, distends the stomach, forces itself into the complexion, and tries to ooze out at the eyes”.

We are safe, too. Travelling by train in the early days of steam was often dangerous. In 1865 ten people died when a train racing to London from Folkestone ran downhill at 50mph into a viaduct that had been closed for repairs. Six carriages fell into the riverbed below and the seventh, in which Dickens was a passenger, was left balanced over the precipice. He climbed out and passed his hip flask of brandy to other survivors. Today ten people still die each day on the commuter railways of Mumbai.

The history of the journey to work is in large part the history of modern society. With the frantic spread of railways, trams and omnibuses in the 19th century, as the working class began to enjoy the same mobility as City stockbrokers, it became hard to ignore their political will. In 1867, the year of the Second Reform Act, the political journalist Walter Bagehot suggested that there was no better place to take the pulse “of the ordinary mass of educated, but still commonplace, mankind” than “the opinion of the bald-headed man on the back of the omnibus”. This insight later found its way into cliché as “the man on the Clapham omnibus”.

Rush Hour, an entertaining study by the corporate lawyer turned historian Iain Gately, falls into three parts. The first and longest is a lively account of the stress, overcrowding and social awkwardness that have dogged travellers since the first railway lines opened. Then comes a survey of the shape of things today, tapering into a not entirely convincing argument that commuting generally makes people happier and healthier.

The book is best in the last section, where Gately indulges in some futurology. Telecommuting, HS2 and maglev lines that could take travellers from Dover to Aberdeen in an hour are studied and discarded before he settles tentatively on driverless cars as the likeliest next widely adopted technology.

Rush Hour is never less than interesting, pacey and rattling with trivia. The only big disappointment, apart from Gately’s reliance on secondary sources, is the lack of attention dedicated to cycling as a solution to clogged motorways and crowded trains and buses. In 1939 twice as many British commuters cycled to work as drove a car. Three quarters of a century on, getting back to that ratio would be something almost like progress.

Rush Hour: How 500m commuters survive the daily journey to work by Iain Gately. To order for £14.99 including postage visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call The Times Bookshop on 0845 2712134

Potholes plugged with a self-healing concrete and roads that warn cyclists of icy conditions may become the norm by 2050, scientists have suggested.

The Future of Highways, a report by Arup, the international design consultancy, considers how trends in urbanisation, climate change, resource depletion and changes in human behaviour will affect our roads.

Arup raises the prospect of pavements that use kinetic energy from pedestrians to power street lamps, tyres that deploy retractable studs for increased grip when ordered to by the car, and drones that monitor and carry deliveries. The report comes after George Osborne this week announced the the biggest road-building programme for a generation, pledging £15 billion for improvements.

Tony Marshall, of Arup, said: “It’s interesting that the government strategy included significant investment in funding innovation. The aim of [our] report is to look at trends and predict how they will develop.

“By thinking across modes we can move towards a connected, low-carbon future.”

The world’s vehicle count is expected to grow by 3 per cent each year until 2030 and the proportion of people living in cities is predicted to reach 75 per cent by 2050. The report created a series of fictional case studies to deal with greater urbanisation and analysed global innovation in vehicles, materials and technology.

Researchers from the universities of Bath, Cardiff and Cambridge are developing a self-healing concrete that uses bacteria to seal cracks. Giken, a Japanese construction company, developed an automated underground bicycle park that can retrieve b

However, Ian Pearson, a futurologist, dismissed the significance of the report’s low-carbon focus. “It will be a historical issue. By then we will have more nuclear and solar energy, so we really don’t need to worry about using oil. It’s basically a hit list of what you can do in 2050,” Dr Pearson said.

Google has programmed its driverless cars to break speed limits by up to 10mph because it believes that allowing them to do so will improve road safety.

Dmitri Dolgov, the lead software engineer on Google’s driverless cars project, said research had shown that keeping to a speed limit when nearby cars were going faster was more dangerous than speeding up.

Google is testing its cars on the streets of Mountain View, the Silicon Valley town that is home to Google’s headquarters. The cars have not yet been tested in the UK, but Vince Cable, the business secretary, announced last month that companies will be able to test driverless cars in certain cities from the start of next year.

The Highway Code states that vehicles cannot travel faster than the national speed limit in any circumstance. The government has promised to review road rules in advance of the introduction of driverless car testing.

Some research has suggested that a car moving slowly amid faster-moving traffic is likely to cause other vehicles to bunch up behind it, which could lead to an accident. “Thousands and thousands of people are killed in car accidents every year,” Mr Dolgov said. Allowing driverless cars to speed “could change that”.

J Christian Gerdes, faculty director of the REVS Institute for Automotive Research at Stanford University, said that the Google car’s ability to recognise unusual objects and to react in abnormal situations were significant hurdles that had yet to be overcome.

There were also ethical issues with driverless cars, he said. “Should a car try to protect its occupants at the expense of hitting pedestrians? And will we accept it when machines make mistakes, even if they make far fewer mistakes than humans?”

There are also unresolved issues around legal liability when a driverless car is involved in a crash.

Google’s driverless car project, which began in 2009, is being run by its Google X experimental technology division. The same unit developed Google Glass, the “smart” eyewear that was released earlier this year.

* Britain is a nation of middle-lane hoggers even though motorists facing a fine of £100 for breaking the law. A study by ICM Research found that almost six drivers in ten say they hog the middle lane of the motorway and almost one in ten admit that they always or regularly do so.

Driverless cars will be permitted to take to the roads in four locations around Britain next month, it was confirmed yesterday, as George Osborne announced a boost in research funding.

People in Bristol, Milton Keynes, Coventry and Greenwich, southeast London, can expect to see them being tested from January 1.

Funding for three trial projects — Gateway, Venturer and UK Autodrive — was announced by the chancellor yesterday. The government has provided another £9 million for the trials, which will take between 18 and 36 months to complete, increasing the overall budget to £19 million.

Experts at Innovate UK, the government agency charged with accelerating economic growth, hope the research will increase understanding of the technology. The departments for transport and business, innovation and skills have each committed £2.75 million of fresh spending for the project, with the Treasury putting up a further £3.5 million for its budget.

Nick Jones, Innovate UK’s lead technologist, said driverless cars would trigger “the most significant transformation in road travel since the introduction of the internal combustion engine”.

Britain has a head start over some of its European competitors in the field, who are restricted from road testing the technology for the next three years by the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic. It is estimated that the autonomous transport industry will be worth £900 billion before 2025.