The (poor) economics of removing drivers from existing metros just goes to show what an extremely efficient way of moving people they already are.
Maybe the issue is the difference in my understanding of human potential. There is simply so much more to do for these people that I can't see why someone would want to forcefully hold onto old ways. Why would you force a person to spend all days in tunnels?
Technology for automated metro is there for many years. Not using it is foolish. If you don't like people losing jobs, simply take the savings and employ the people elsewhere in the city, e.g. as bus drivers.
You said that there was "so much more to do for these people" that doesn't "waste human potential" if only we didn't "force" them to do dreary metro jobs. I'm saying that if you take away their dreary metro jobs, most of them will just wind up in dreary non-metro jobs unless we have a better situation standing by ready to receive them, which we don't.
If you want to free people from a life of drudgery, you need to offer an alternative, not just lay off all the drudges.
Edit: Or are you specifically opposed to underground jobs, not bad jobs in general?
At a local grocery store they employ mentally handicap people to man the check out counters. They aren’t even aware that the automated counters make their jobs totally useless.
They are extremely slow at checkout.
And yet, I am very pleased with this grocery store because they’ve given a menial task to people who would otherwise have nothing. A chance to be in society and interact with us. Maybe, given the self checkout, it’s theater; but I don’t care. What’s the alternative for these people? Euthanasia? Do you see value in their lives?
Let's not do something like non-automatic metro because ... What? I still don't know a single reason other than "these are jobs and they are considered prestigious and well paid" which is not a reason to me, especially since people here would say it about nearly every job I could talk about. There is not that much jobs today we can automate as well as riding trains, so why not start there?
I would hate myself if I decided that it's a good idea to force a person, even if they're mentally incapable (that would make it worse, actually), to spend whole days in tunnels, having to mindlessly push a button, when there is a proven way to easily automate. I just don't know why would someone do such a crazy thing from my point of view?
Most of the automated trash collection services haven’t automated much. They simply moved the responsibility of rolling the bins to the curb from the workers to the residents. Now it’s my job to wake up at 5am to move the bin to the street so the grappling arm can catch it. And then move it back to the house before 8am or get fined.
Of course the compensation and working hours aren't as good as the six figure office jobs most people here have but dealing with refuse is pretty decent compared to other jobs of similar pay.
Contrast this with my job. Energy researcher. Let’s assume energy research is necessary. Odds are that in my career I won’t make a ground breaking discovery. So I get up drag myself to work knowing that most likely than not nothing I will do that day will mean anything to anyone.
Not to say that sanitation work shouldn’t be automated. But the lack of respect for ppl’s livelihoods commonly shown in HN, or in general neoliberal circles, is astonishing.
Where automation really helps though is with _frequency_ of trains. If you have headways which are half as long (like in Vancouver on the Expo line the headways are every 90 seconds during peak periods) it makes a huge difference compared to something like SF's BART which has a weekday frequency of 15 minutes.
It also makes a massive difference when you're building a new line. If you can half the headway, you can half the size of the platform which makes building the line considerably cheaper. Less land to appropriate, less concrete to pour, less land to dig, etc.
There is one problem though. If you build a super convenient metro system with trains every minute or two, people will start to use that system. A lot. Vancouver's system is running into problems (particularly on the Canada Line) with massive overcrowding because even with the high frequency of trains, there's just not enough capacity.
Trains require large headway (gaps between trains, like following distance in a car) for safety reasons. This limits the number of trains you can run on a line. Which places a natural limit on the number of drivers you need.
Instead, you scale up passenger throughput by adding cars to trains. When you do this, you scale up capacity independent of number of drivers. Sort of a marginal cost of zero.
Another efficiency question, though, is bang for the buck. Trains are expensive to build. Headway limits the number of trains, and you can't make trains longer than the platform length. So you hit kind of a brick wall of scalability.
So it's worth asking whether automation could let you squeeze more return out of your investment in building the train line. Maybe it would unlock capacity increases through reduced headway. Or maybe some other way. I think it's an open question how much this can help, though.