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The myth of the driverless tube train

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Re: The myth of the driverless tube train

#111

Post by speapr »

crimsoneer wrote: post #16
627467 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't be popular opinion but, one benefit of driverless subway is: decreased risk of industrial action disruptions. In the city I live underground drivers hold ridiculous privileged (even compared to other underground workers) that allows positions to be effectively hereditary: children of drivers are more likely to get into the job than others.

This. London's tube system is essentially stopped a day or so a year due to strikes, which is pretty dramatic for a city of 10 million people who rely on it.

Perhaps the drivers should be paid a sum of money which closer reflects how much marginal value they add to the city, and this would convince them not to strike.

Re: The myth of the driverless tube train

#112

Post by vidarh »

ArkanExplorer wrote: post #93
vidarh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mainline trains is a non-starter for many decades, though, at least in the UK which still has a large number of level crossings, as well as stations with "fun" issues such as being too short for the longest trains. There is tech solutions in place to prevent the wrong doors from opening. Except when it doesn't work, where you really need someone on the train. And yes, it does fail. Been on trains when the doors refus…

It sounds like this could be all done remotely, with cameras, and one worker physically present at each station, plus a roving maintenance team. If we can fly drones through the deserts of Arabia why can't we drive trains remotely through the suburbs of Croydon?

I don't know if you suggested Croydon because you've seen me mention living there, or if you picked it at random or because it's one of the main locations with trains heading for Victoria, but Croydon is one of the highest trafficked parts of the UK rail network, with an interconnected set of some of the most complex junctions in the country, and a large rail depot that is hard to secure because of its sheer size...

It's if anything one of the worst places in the entire UK to start such a project.

The problem with what you suggest is that a ten minutes delay at East Croydon during rush hour, if you're lucky and a problem happens near a station, can easily lead to rush hour traffic from large parts of the South Coast to both London Victoria and London Bridge piling up with effects lasting for an hour or more. It's a horrible chokepoint. There are plans to fix that [1], but those plans also involve multi-year projects. In fact the planning has been going on for years at this point.

A similar issue is a problem for the London Underground - while there are fewer complex junctions, the margins are far tighter. A train that's stuck on the station for a couple of minutes can have knock on effects over a larger area.

All of this is solvable, but the costs involved in various improvements to mitigate them means it'd take a very long time before those investments would start paying off.

[1] https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/our-routes...

Re: The myth of the driverless tube train

#113

Post by KineticLensman »

e17 wrote: post #97
KineticLensman wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything from a more relevant era Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_London_Underground_acc... Incidentally, I narrowly avoided one of these accidents: The Kings Cross fire of 1987 [1] which killed 31 people. This was caused by a fire under a (wooden) escalator that hadn't been cleaned. I passed through about an hour before the fire started. I was returning from a conference in London. A friend and…

This subthread you are commenting on is about head-on collisions. There have been none since 1975 and I think you will agree that given that passengers on that train were wearing hats and smoking pipes, it's not particularly relevant to any kind of modern railway.

>> I'm talking about any kind of general emergency.

Hence me posting the list of general accidents

Re: The myth of the driverless tube train

#114

Post by speapr »

LatteLazy wrote: post #58
me_me_me wrote: post #3

Why would it matter? You need so few subway drivers/conductors that does it really matter if you need one per train? Taxis are probably average a driver per 1.5 ish customers. Subway/train is hundreds. This reminds me of optimisation of non critical code. Sure its nice, but the cost/benefit is just not there.

It's political. In the uk, train drivers unions are one of the last meaningful unions left and the right wing government hates that. Also, London has a left wing mayor and a very good public transport system. The right wing government hate both the mayor (he's heir apparent to lead the party nationally) and the concept of public transport. That's also the real reason private train operators were bailed out but public…

Interestingly, this is a situation created by previous Conservative governments. When the national rail system was privatized, lots of smaller individual train operating companies were created, each with a franchise to run different lines. They are incentivized not to cooperate with each other, because taking over another franchise, if another operator fails, doubles the size of your business.

So the employers were divided and the highly unionized employees were united, which meant that they did extremely well in negotiations. The membership overall are extremely loyal to their union leadership, because of how successful they've been in maintaining conditions and improving wages.

Re: The myth of the driverless tube train

#115

Post by vidarh »

KineticLensman wrote: post #22

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 netwo…

Note the weasel words. "Progress towards". Not conversion. Just progress.

Re: The myth of the driverless tube train

#116

Post by pydry »

rocqua wrote: post #13
me_me_me wrote: post #3

Why would it matter? You need so few subway drivers/conductors that does it really matter if you need one per train? Taxis are probably average a driver per 1.5 ish customers. Subway/train is hundreds. This reminds me of optimisation of non critical code. Sure its nice, but the cost/benefit is just not there.

The stated reason in the article is largely: to avoid strikes. Though the article also argues that this just pushes the power to strike on to other places.

They're not just trying to de-skill driving the trains though, they're trying to de-skill all aspects of running the network.

Re: The myth of the driverless tube train

#117

Post by [deleted] »

jusssi wrote: post #33
e17 wrote: post #20

If something goes wrong in the middle of a 120 year old tunnel, 30 metres beneath the city, I want there to be a trained, responsible member of staff in place to manage the situation. It's that simple.

Here's a list of places for you to avoid (granted, not all of them run in a tunnel): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...

[deleted]

Re: The myth of the driverless tube train

#118

Post by pydry »

lbriner wrote: post #40
e17 wrote: post #20

If something goes wrong in the middle of a 120 year old tunnel, 30 metres beneath the city, I want there to be a trained, responsible member of staff in place to manage the situation. It's that simple.

This isn't really the argument though. Sure, we want a member of staff to help but they could be a £30K train manager instead of a £70K driver.

How badly paid do you want the people responsible for your safety to be?

Re: The myth of the driverless tube train

#119

Post by LeanderK »

masklinn wrote: post #91
mschuster91 wrote: post #75

> There are over 100 metro systems in the world built before 2000. Of those, why have only four been converted to full automation? Because the retrofits that the article details, no matter if installing platform doors, re-wiring infrastructure or replacing old carriages to actually enable consistent door positions, costs a lot of money, and public transport isn't at the top of public spending priority - car infrastru…

And FWIW the platform doors are really only required for scare-mongering reasons. I don’t know if that changed by now but Lyon’s Line D went GoA4 in 1992 with no platform doors (for the longest time there weren’t even turnstiles, you could just walk walk / run from the entrance to the train with no stops). The only accident I’ve heard of is someone falling on the train from a mezzanine above the carriage (they were d…

nuremberg underground also has not platform doors

Re: The myth of the driverless tube train

#120

Post by cjrp »

Mauricebranagh wrote: post #83
Zenst wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Won't be popular opinion but, one benefit of driverless subway is: decreased risk of industrial action disruptions. Very true, though equally the increased risk of automated safety system stopping the train in the middle of a long tube tunnel because one of it's sensors got dirty or a rat triggered a sensor as it went splat on the tracks are things drivers can work around easier. So if a perfectly safe and working…

And a driver can when some one is blocking the doors not proceed and get the blockage removed quickly. Pre covid in the rush hour this was very common.

That's more a job for the platform staff isn't it? Apart from making (several) announcements I've never seen a driver fix this.
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