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Comment by markvdb | Hacker News Reader

For good reasons or bad, but... machines don't strike. That on its own is a very good reason to fully automate the metro.

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Automated metro lines aren't unsupervised though. The automated lines in Paris and Lille also stop when there is a strike.

No during the last strike (September) in Paris the line 1 and 14 (the only 2 lines with automated metro) were both operational.

That's because the conductors were striking but not the supervisors, though, not because an automated line is inherently immune to striking.

I thought line 14 was stopped because of a strike some time ago but it was apparently just because of an incident, it might never have stopped because of a strike indeed. But that just means the employees that manage it don't strike.

> That's because the conductors were striking but not the supervisors, though

That's the whole point.

Is there a technological reason that it needs supervisors or is that an administrative requirement?

Of course, because however controlled is the environment it runs in, all sorts of unplanned things can happen. A tyre blowing out. A passenger pressing the emergency stop button. A person or animal entering the tracks after defeating the barriers. Flooding in a tunnel.

All of these events need a fast response regardless of whether the hardware detects the problem and stops by itself or not, even if just to evacuate the people that are inside the stopped cars.

Living in Paris, where the people that run the trains have threatened to strike from December 5 "indefinitely" (we'll see what that means), that was also my first thought when reading the article.

Perhaps not strike, but they do sometimes malfunction, go out of order, sometimes due to vandalism, or stop working because of electricity issues.

Automated trains are still run by humans who can go on strike.

So is the biscuit factory, but you may notice that striking biscuit factory workers don't find themselves in such a great position.

Train drivers (and aircraft pilots) have a bunch of special knowledge that isn't transferable and is safety critical. So when the person who is supposed to be doing the job isn't available you can't replace them in a timely fashion.

Automation often allows us to get rid of the specialisation, which makes those striking drivers replaceable, which makes striking less effective.

In the UK for example, my train from Southampton (on the South Coast) to London, has a crew of two people, a driver and a guard, both of whom need to be trained specifically in the exact model of train (let's say it's a 444 Electric Multiple Unit) and the exact route (in this case let's say the Wessex Mainline more or less direct from Southampton to London Waterloo)

If _either_ of those people aren't available, maybe they're on strike but maybe they have flu, that person must be replaced by someone with those two properties. A driver with 20 years experience driving an InterCity 125 on the ECML can't drive that train, but even a driver who has driven exactly the same train, but on the Portsmouth route, can't drive this train because they lack route knowledge. The guard, even though they don't drive the train, needs route knowledge just the same, because of the regulatory changes made in response to Ding-Ding And Away years ago.

Now, if instead these trains used ECTS level 2 automation, any driver, from anywhere in the ECTS system could safely operate that train, because it works the same everywhere. Doubtless local drivers might know a few little non-safety critical edge cases, and so a replacement driver from say, Germany, driving a train in Southampton would be a little slower, but the train doesn't need to be cancelled.

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