The myth of the driverless tube train

What they are actually seeking is

"...progress towards the conversion of at least one Underground line to Grade-of-Automation 3 (driverless, but with an on-board attendant, as on the Docklands Light Railway), subject to a viable business case and its statutory responsibilities."

They are only aiming to do one line, which just happens to meet a complex set of constraints outlined in the article. Doing the entire network would require a massive set of changes as outlined in the article (e.g. to rolling stock, platforms and signalling) to meet the safety requirements.

The requirement for an on-board attendant means that the driverless trains will still be at risk of strike action, in contrast to the line taken by some commenters here.

Note that the actual title is 'political myth'. The article suggests that the main reason for the change is to demonstrate political vision rather than, say, cost savings.

It's a reasonable sounding argument but I don't find it totally convincing.

Firstly, a big deal is made about the need for PEDs. The justification given is vague - essentially that the regulator would require them, because it's now "known" that PEDs are required, and the DLR doesn't have them because, well, really it should but we don't care enough to actually upgrade it. But new stuff must.

This looks like a case of creeping safetyism. If PEDs are really required for the acceptably safe operation of a railway then clearly both the DLR and LU must be considered unsafe, because the number of passenger-on-track or passenger-in-door situations that only a driver can solve seems very small indeed. In fact it's surely the case that platform attendants are better placed to observe these problems as they can easily look along the entire length of even a busy platform, whereas a driver must rely on a mirror. Saying automation "requires" PEDs is a bold statement given the successful and apparently safe operation of the DLR for decades, yet no evidence is provided beyond the opinion of the ORR, which as a regulator is hardly unbiased - they have zero incentive to make automation happen and every incentive not to.

The arguments about strikes also looks superficially reasonable, but I'm not sure it holds on closer inspection. Drivers have a lot of strike power because there are a lot of them and they require a lot of training, so they are impossible to replace as a bloc. Presumably a well automated railway would require only a much smaller number of people in the control room, and those people would require less training, as the software will be carefully checking their inputs and doing the bulk of the work. So if they did decide to strike then you could probably have teams in reserve or call up the manufacturers of the equipment and ask them to send over some of the engineers who built it, to temporarily operate the equipment and train up a new team of control room staff. The striking power would surely be much lower.

Even for physical maintenance staff, yes they can strike, but they can't immediately paralyze a live railway like drivers can. There's a limited amount of time for which a railway can operate without regular maintenance, and if the equipment is already in good condition, it seems likely that the railway can outlast the strikers. Also a lot of physical maintenance is not especially complex to train people on, so alternate workers could be found more easily.

The main reasons the Tube isn't being automated are clearly not that it's some sort of insurmountable challenge, at least not according to this article, but rather than automation has been conflated with general wide-reaching safety and simplification upgrades, based on a dubious argument that drivers are much safer for passengers than any automated system can be. I'm not at all sure that's true.

Actually, yes, British people do rather respond well to calm people with authority during a crisis.

This point is well addressed in the article. There are more staff members than just drivers.

They speak of "myth", but there are many cities with driverless subway trains (e.g., in neighboring Paris, but definitely in more than the four "exceptions" that they mention). Instead of such grandiose philosophical statements, which are ultimately empty, they could make an argument based on facts and observations from the reality.