Risking asking the obvious: What is stopping us from having autonomous subways, considering we are almost gonna have autonomous cars?
NYC has some of the strongest unions in the country. Everything from hotels to the MTA are plagued by really, really strong unions that only care about their interests -- leaving the city with a shameful transit system, in this case.
Unions make up nearly 25% of workers in NYC[2], that's more than the double the national average. The corruption is rampant[3] and the city is literally powerless against them[4].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14948921
[2] http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20170910/BLOGS01/170909...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/nyregion/carpenters-nyc-u...
The increasing inequality in the US can in large part be attributed to corporations winning the war against Unions. Corporations have been ruthless towards this end, including funding think-tanks that gaslight Americans.
This creates a communication hurdle between Europe and America. The expectations of what a union does differ so much, you could say Europeans and Americans mean a totally different thing when using the same word.
Unions sound more like your personal bogeyman than an actual cause.
To add insult to injury, construction costs for transit are much lower in Paris and London than NYC.
But let's attack the unions again, because that's less complex (and matches a popular and old political narrative) than pointing to systemic incompetence and short term thinking at the administrative level.
The DLR is fully automated, but has a member of staff on board, and the 4 times I used it this year the staff member was always in manual control.
If rail doesn't get automated before cars, I don't see branch lines surviving. But then I don't see them surviving automated cars either. Main lines, sure, but I'll be getting an auto-taxi to the mainline station rather than the hourly connecting train.
I believe the rules require a member of staff to check the doors and permit the train to depart, but that can be done from the platform instead (and is, at peak times).
Full automation will be permitted on lines with platform edge doors; the intention is to do this for the deep tubes at least for the central sections, but it's a 3-step process (replace the trains with ones that work with PEDs, fit the PEDs, then remove the driving cabs) that wasn't expected to be done before the late 2020s, and that was before the severe underfunding of TfL with the loss of central government support and the mayor's fare freeze.
There are ways to make the union happy and the workers happy it just takes longer term thinking which governments and voters are frightently bad at.
The actual criticism to be made here is the pathology of all New York institutions and the people entrenched among them - the unions that serve the MTA, the people who own, build and rent the real estate, the politicians who effective rule by plutocracy.
The corruption of New York's unions is simply the end state of a city whose underlying mechanisms have all been captured by a small group of people interested only in enriching themselves. Many of those institutions are unions.
Hell, I'd be fine paying the unionized subway employees for the rest of their lives to sit at home doing literally nothing if that was the only way to get them to agree to automating their jobs away. At least then we'd have the outcome we want, and not have to pay the next several generations of subway operators to do a job that holds the system back.
Helsinki metro was planning to have automated trains when the western extension opens in 2014. It opened in late 2017, without automation because of technical difficulties. I have a hard time believing there will be much automated traffic on the roads here (with uneven surfaces, unclear markings, snow, and other traffic) before the metro can be automated (in a dedicated tunnel where there is no other traffic, movement is technically only possible on the rails and there is no snow).
Port Island Line (Kobe) opened as GOA4 (fully automated) in 1981 followed by Lille Metro in 1983 and Vancouver's SkyTrain in 1985.
The US has several GOA4 systems, though they're mostly airport shuttles and people movers (AeroTrain at Dulles, Monorail at Tampa, STS at Tacoma) a few serve actual communities (DPM, Metromover, Morgantown, Las Vegas Monorail).
> Helsinki metro was planning to have automated trains when the western extension opens in 2014. It opened in late 2017, without automation because of technical difficulties.
Wow, that's a bit ridiculous.
Less than what's happened with the London Underground Sub-Surface Railway, which is now on the third resignalling contract to get them to GoA Level 3.
http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/single-view/view/helsinki...
The Helsinki Metro is also a bit unusual in that it uses Russian wide gauge track (for compatability with the rest of the rail system) but Western tech otherwise, meaning basically everything has to be custom made and is priced accordingly.
(The Finnish rail gauge is in fact nominally different from the current one in Russia, because USSR changed from "imperialist" 1524 mm to "metric" 1520 mm between 1970 and 1990; the trains are in practice compatible, though.)
That's a bit of a stretch. Muni and BART use automated train control. SFMTA went with Alcatel/Thales' awful SelTrac system that the Docklands Light Rail uses while BART uses its own monstrosity. Both systems have human operators at all times because neither system is reliable enough to run unattended.
SFMTA used to show which modes trains inside the tunnel were running in. They also used to publish detailed daily service reports that revealed just how bad things were. At one point, > 50% of trains were unable to enter the tunnel in auto mode as the VETAG transponders had a roughly 100% failure rate. For many years the trains themselves would destroy the trackside inductive loops as well, periodically disabling the train control system. Instead the MTA chose to sanitize the reports, and eventually stopped publishing the information at all.
The great irony is that Muni's train control system was so inefficient that drivers would routinely drop into manual mode upon approach to the last underground system without even so much as a heads up to the dispatchers. And then, in 2009, one of the drivers passed out and ran his train into the train parked at the platform. Instead of requiring drivers to pass a health check like the FAA does for pilots, the MTA simply forbade manual operation in the tunnel. From the pictures, that driver was easily 400 lbs and Muni only cares about drugs and color blindness. Net result: 5-10 minutes got added to each outbound trip.
BART, of course, has its own maladies -- if you've ever had to wait for the train to be repositioned before the doors open you know why they still keep their drivers around.
At this point, IMO, neither humans nor automation alone can solve the transit problem.
VAL[0] has been a thing since the Lille Metro opened in 1983 and AnsaldoBreda[1] is being deployed all over the world (it's the platform for Honolulu's upcoming HART).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Véhicule_Automatique_Léger
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AnsaldoBreda_Driverless_Metro
What? Alstom, Ansaldo STS, Bombardier, Siemens, and Thales all have off-the-shelf designs that they will happily sell. And I've probably forgotten some here. I realise none of these are American companies, and "Buy American" is often a constraint on acquisitions in the US, but it's fundamentally untrue that there are no off-the-shelf designs.
See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_con... for various systems using various suppliers' products.
The latter is very popular and getting deployed in several places right now: Honolulu, Thessaloniki, Lima 2, Rome C, …
To nitpick, this is actually Hitachi (the ex-AnsaldoBreda part) and Ansaldo STS (which Hitachi only bought 40% of, and became its own company when Hitachi bought AnsaldoBreda).
Depending on rolling stock and space for equipment, replacing the rolling stock when replacing the signalling equipment might not be required (see, for example, the the London Underground 1995 Stock on the Northern Line).
Is Breda really popular? SFMTA forbade Breda from bidding on this latest round of vehicles because the current ones have been so problematic. I don't think Chicago or Seattle had a much better experience with Breda either.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit#Automat...
Interestingly, at the time the Vancouver SkyTrain was undergoing construction, the same tech was being installed in Toronto for the Scarborough rapid transit line. The transit union in Toronto opposed automation, so the trains had to be specially modified to add operator cabins so the trains could be driven manually. Vancouver was able to get away with it because the system was a greenfield project, there was no union of subway workers around already to oppose automating the trains.
"The line operates using fully automated [..]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_4_(Budapest_Metro)
The DC Metro used to have a semi-autonomous mode that's been turned off for years since there was a glitch that caused a crash.
I'm not expecting the DC Metro to go autonomous anytime soon either. It's a huge jobs program for inner city residents. Basically a commuter tax for a social program.
Although I would assume there are conductors in a control centre somewhere?
See http://www.ansaldo-sts.com/sites/ansaldosts/files/brochures/... page 21.
Of course the reality of it is more complicated, but they are a powerful force (for better or worse).
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_U-Bahn#Fifth_expansion_... it seems that vienna isn't driverless yet.
You can quite often see the trains operate fully automatic though when the drivers are changing shifts at the end of the line. The driver typically leaves and locks the train, lets it reverse itself and then the next driver continues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eyjqS9lvNA
Union culture is as antagonistic in France as in the US (for the same reasons that corporations are antagonistic) and it not only has multiple GOA4 metro systems running right now across the country[0], Paris is actually converting existing lines to full automation.
All of Germany (which has a much more cooperative union culture) has two GOA4 lines both in Nuremberg, meanwhile Copenhagen Metro (in highly unionised Denmark) was created fully automated back in 2002.
I see no evidence that unions have anything to do with it.
[0] quite literally: Lille, Toulouse, Lyon, Rennes, Paris
Unions in the US are annoyingly different: most (at least those that I'm even passingly familiar with) seem to have one major goal: keeping the status quo (with regular pay and benefits increases for its members, of course). They generally do not go for "hey, we're going to eliminate your jobs, but we'll compensate you in such a way that you'll continue to be gainfully employed elsewhere".
Often that topic does not even come up because companies are not firing people to begin with like they do in the US. They just transition into a new role (for instance they could become light rail drivers in the same network where automation is not yet achievable).
Also, as far as I can tell US public sector unions are as strong as those in any other rich country.
Many cities with autonomous trains indeed have drivers. But they don't do nothing, they sit there for emergencies and to set the go signal when leaving the station. In Austria for instance that's not because of unions but because the job of the driver is at this point considered important. For fully autonomous operation you need extra security features on the track which were not employed (fully sealed off track in stations, better emergency corridors, more reliable remote door controls etc.).
Where fully automated trains are in operation there are never any drivers.
FWIW Lyon's Line D is fully automated (GOA4) and doesn't use enclosed track. It may have changed since but it used to not even have turnstiles, you could walk up to the track without any pause.
The only incident I can remember is a drunk who literally fell on a train from one of the elevated passages over the track.
10-20 years from now isn't exactly "almost"