> human driver
Not in any even remotely modern system that will have a high degree of automation and if there's a driver, they're only closing and opening doors, and telling the train to get going.
Not in any even remotely modern system that will have a high degree of automation and if there's a driver, they're only closing and opening doors, and telling the train to get going.
I assumed that everything would be automated but in fact nothing is.
They explained that they regularly face situations that require human intervention (several times a day), and that even a little automation would reduce the level of attention on the part of the conductor.
The conductor is required to interact with the controls at least every 30 seconds to avoid setting off alarms.
So I think it is a much, much harder environment to automate. Paris do have some metro line that are fully automatic (line 1 at least) and both Rennes metro lines are fully automatic. It is much easier to control the environment around a metro and ensure that nothing can go on the rails, and have surveillance system to check if, if it does happen, it is detected ASAP.
Or camels: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/animaux/un-dromadaire-apercu-aux...
> So I think it is a much, much harder environment to automate. Paris do have some metro line that are fully automatic (line 1 at least) and both Rennes metro lines are fully automatic. It is much easier to control the environment around a metro and ensure that nothing can go on the rails, and have surveillance system to check if, if it does happen, it is detected ASAP.
Even the non-fully automatic lines use heavy automation (e.g. lines such as 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13).
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/looking-af...
Barcelona, on the other hand, would qualify for everything except line 4.
Also if we want to quibble, at least a few sections of the Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines (which are still completely manually driven) were opened after 1906.
From 1907 onwards every newly built line was automated from opening (though indeed extensions or "new" lines made by splitting an existing line were sometimes manually driven).
(The Jubilee line in 1979 – which started out being manually driven – wouldn't count according to your criteria, because part of it was "made by splitting an existing line", and apart from being heavy rail, arguably Crossrail could be argued to be an extension, too, even though it does operate automatically on the new-built bits, i.e. the central section plus the Abbey Wood branch.)
Paris has the same, and also a number of lines (1, 4, 14, and soon 15) which have no driver at all.
NYC Subway is an outlier in how obsolete everything is.
Grand Paris Express' president also talked about this, and compared the 2nd avenue subway to the Grand Paris Express (well, one cost $4.45 billion for 1.8 mi / 2.9 km and 4 stations; the first line of GPE, 15 south is 33km, 16 stations, and costs ~8 billion euros so it's a really bad comparison), and has said that if he had to do things the way the MTA do it, GPE would have gone nowhere.
The real advantage of automation though is without a human driver it becomes cheap to run a lot of trains that are not very full and that makes your system nearly as convenient as driving in the suburbs.
All modern ones (in an urban/suburban context, which is what the post and thread are about; interurban is a bit more mixed, but every high speed line is highly automated too, because at those speeds there simply isn't the time for a human to react) are.
> The real advantage of automation though is without a human driver it becomes cheap to run a lot of trains that are not very full
And you can also have a very high frequency (60-90s intervals), which is impossible with manual operations. This increases capacity, on top of the convenience.