Will we be ready for self-drive cars? The age of the driverless car may not be far away: some say 10 years, others 20. Google, among companies developing autonomous cars in the US, has tested them on public roads in Nevada, including the Las Vegas Strip. To say the UK is unprepared for this is an understatement. It all sounds a bit like a Buster Keaton movie, full of deliberate near-misses. Your self-driving vehicle, using sensors and the Global Positioning System, will take you to work, driving nose-to-tail in a fast flow of traffic. It will take itself off to park in a multi-storey miles away, or perhaps go home to take the kids to school and return for you later. Brian Groom This is likely to transform lives, businesses and the design of cities. Young people put off from learning to drive will not need to bother. Cars may be rented rather than owned: why have one sitting outside your home when you can summon one instantly with a smartphone? You could drive to a country pub, if there are any left by then, without failing a breath test. You could travel overnight from, say, London to Scotland or Cornwall, or vice versa, and sleep all the way (better hope the satnav works). Accidents will fall by at least 90 per cent by eliminating human error, scientists say, preventing thousands of deaths. It will liberate the sick and other people who cannot drive. Superior safety will mean that cars may become lighter, saving fuel. But there could be downsides. Self-drive cars are likely to encourage longer commutes, worsening suburban sprawl and intensifying battles over housing development in pretty rural spots. Although they may increase lane capacity up to sixfold by cramming in more cars at higher speeds, they could become so popular that they prompt more road-building, setting off environmental battles and reversing the recovery of the railways. They would benefit economic growth by freeing time and improving productivity, though there would be a painful transition for cabbies, and lorry and bus drivers. But how can we move towards adoption of this technology? This raises numerous questions, not least who would be liable for accidents. The public is likely to be wary. Allister Heath, editor of free business newspaper City AM, argues that the government simply needs to legalise driverless cars, tweak accident liability rules and step back. Others doubt that would be sufficient. Stian Westlake, policy director at Nesta, an innovation body, suggests a competition in which towns could bid to be the test bed. The government and industry would subsidise some cars and make locally applicable changes to the law. I suspect that what happens in the US, where this is most advanced, will determine how it is adopted in the UK and elsewhere. London pulls ahead Is the divide between London and the rest of the UK widening? As the Financial Times reported on Monday, six in 10 tower cranes erected in the past three years were in the capital. Other indicators of post-recession performance suggest a more mixed picture. According to the Office for National Statistics, London's gross value added per head slipped from 174.1 per cent of the UK average in 2009 to 170.7 in 2011, having previously soared from 156.8 in 1997. But if the capital had a hiccup in its apparently irresistible rise, recent indicators suggest it may be pulling away again. The number of people in work, for example, has grown 4.7 per cent in London in the past 12 months, nearly treble the national increase. Unemployment, at 8.9 per cent compared with the 7.9 per cent UK average, has dropped by 1.1 percentage points in a year. In the latest Lloyds TSB regional purchasing managers" index of economic activity, London records a figure of 53.8, above the UK-wide 51.4. For the first time the capital attracted more than half of all commercial property investment in 2012, according to DTZ, the property consultancy. The coalition's effort to "rebalance" the economy, with faster growth outside London and the southeast, looks to be struggling. Royal rebuke Dame Helen Mirren, in stage costume as the Queen, gave a ripe dressing-down to drummers making a racket outside London's Gielgud Theatre. Perhaps they should have gone on to Buckingham Palace to see if they would also draw a sweary rant from the real Queen - though Her Majesty, of course, may prefer the sound of drums to theatre.