TfL abandons plans for driverless tube trains
ianvisits.co.uk
ianvisits.co.uk
Take the Victoria line doing approximately a full lap of the circuit in an hour, north to south and back again.
That one train with one driver has a capacity of 260 seated, 1000 in total. People get on and off all of the time so the actual usage can be far higher, most people do a few stops or half the route max. Based on riding the tube I would guess that the average train has at least 1000 users an hour e.g. 500 northbound, 500 southbound using this example.
If the train driver gets paid £100 an hour (feels high) then it’s 10p per person per trip or approx 30 seconds of work at the minimum wage.
The entire thing feels like optimisation for the sake of it, I’m happy for my tube driver to get 10 bloody pence from my fare. Even if my assumptions are wrong then say it’s 20p or 50p or whatever that feels totally reasonable.
A taxi is completely different because in that case the hourly rate of the driver is basically the entire fare, you are pretty much paying for the time of one person 1:1.
You're just using the wrong units. You'd normally measure transportation in passenger-miles. (Or, as the case may be, passenger-km.)
Basically, per passenger served.
Per mile basis is weird in a metro system because of distortions like how a mile in the centre is both slower and far more in demand than a mile at the edges.
What's the problem supposed to be? Passenger-miles automatically take that effect into account. They go down when speed goes down, and up when demand goes up.
> both slower and far more in demand
By the way, it sounds like you think this is something strange about a metro system, but higher demand means lower speed for every form of transportation.
> Basically, per passenger served.
This is a mistake; the guy who crosses the whole city has gotten more value out of the metro system than the guy who goes one stop.
Not necessarily. The value you receive from a transportation service is mostly a function how badly you want/need to be at the destination, as well as things like how comfortable and fast the ride is. If anything, the guy travelling a shorter distance got more value because his ride took less time!
Or to put it another way, there is little value to me in travelling a long, laborious route all the way across the city if I don't have a pressing need to be at that destination. But if I need to be at work in 30 minutes I get huge value from taking the metro to the nearby station, even if it's only 2 stops away.
> But if I need to be at work in 30 minutes I get huge value from taking the metro to the nearby station, even if it's only 2 stops away.
Not really; as you just noted, the subway is a very slow method of covering distance. If you're in a hurry, it's not going to beat the alternatives.
No, I think you misread or misunderstood what I wrote. My point is that the "value" derived from a trip is _not_ proportional to the distance travelled.
> "Not really; as you just noted, the subway is a very slow method of covering distance. If you're in a hurry, it's not going to beat the alternatives."
In London, the tube or train is often the fastest way to get somewhere, particularly at rush hour. But if I place a high value on comfort, perhaps I'd consider that I get more value from a taxi ride even if it takes the same amount of time: the tube can be very hot and crowded! I'd then have to consider whether the extra value gained is enough to justify the higher cost of the taxi ride.
If we have to do that, then for my original post, the relevant factor is passenger minutes/hours travelled because the driver's cost scales with time not distance.
My cost is not proportional to either, though. If I go to my nearest station and go the next tube stop or if I go five tube stops the fare is the same. If anything it's inversely proportional e.g. the longer I spend on the train, the less I contribute to the driver's hourly wage.
The amount of time I spend and the amount of value I derive is entirely irrelevant to any of this.
I'm not especially interested in any of this beyond my original point that the cost of the driver is trivial on a per passenger basis, my back of the envelope calculation gives the same result (doesn't matter) even if you 3x or 0.33x the outcome.
More or less the same as the DLR, except the Victoria line has a permanent driver's seat/cabin where as the DLR operator can move throughout the train.
(Personally I'd rather be a DLR "operator", at least you're on your feet much of the time and getting some exercise. But I bet the Victoria line "drivers" get paid more!)
Yes, seems not far off. There's something close to 500 scheduled Victoria line services per day in each direction (less on Sundays, and not all services will operate if there's disruption/delays). Annual Victoria line ridership in 2019 was 302 million, or 827k per day on average. So, roughly, 827 passengers per train service on average (but not all at once!).
Each service takes around 35 minutes to do the full line from Brixton to Walthamstow, plus turnaround time at each end. Some services turn back early at Finsbury Park or Seven Sisters. So each train will be doing a bit more than 1 service per hour.
"The main benefit of driverless trains is capacity, as the computerised control systems can allow trains to run closer together, which increases passenger capacity on the railway."
However as the article says this isn't as big a gain on the Underground since it is pretty optimized already and gains would be minimal for the cost.
For most metro-type rail systems driverless is the way to go though, it can offer increased capacity and lower running cost (especially off-peak).
Automated driverless trains allow for higher frequency, reduce the need for a shitty job, and allow operations in inconvenient for humans hours and times.
I've always gathered there's quite a waiting list to get in. This from a tube driver:
>You need to find a role within TfL. It doesn't have to be customer facing, but it has to be something within TfL. Once you're employed for 6 months with TfL, you can apply for Train Operator, when the job is available. If you pass all the interviews and assessments, you'll be entered into a queue before you start training. This could be a couple of years. In short, yes it is pretty hard to get the job of tube driver. https://www.reddit.com/r/LondonUnderground/comments/ti7skk/h...
Mostly because there aren't that many lowish skilled jobs paying £70k for a 35 hour week in London.
> It’s now been confirmed that the study reached the same conclusion that every other study into the issue has already reported — it’ll cost an awful lot of money for very little benefit.
Trains feel like something where drivers and conductors and platform staff are a social good. We're beyond cost at this point, it's about public utility.
Public transit is quite different. It's not as opex-intensive as flying, it's usually subsidized by the state, and it's often pretty much a monopoly.
They also removed the roles of radio operator, navigator, flight engineer and third officer without compromising safety or capability [1]. I'd want to see studies. But single pilot + relief crew should be safe enough to start with for long-haul flights.
This argument was made for each of those now-obsolete roles. I'd want to see data before concluding there is a benefit to a second person on checklists. In reality, that advantage would only manifest if the captain is inexperienced, self-check systems have failed and the radio/remote ops have failed.
> Even if there is a relief pilot onboard they might be sleeping and unable to make it to the cockpit fast enough to help
Can you name a crash which occured because the FO was in the bathroom?
I don't think that's a strong argument. The only time a pilot goes to the bathroom is during the most boring portion of the flight when everything is going exactly as expected. Planes so rarely have excitement occur at that phase of flight that the odds are really low of it happening at the exact moment one of the pilots is using the head.
Planes don't have something go wrong to the point of running checklists in an expected way.
Germanwings 9525. Can’t discount human factors, especially in an industry where human factors are very frequently the root cause of incidents.
More importantly I can name any number of flights where two pilots became task saturated and flew a plane into the ground. Or flights where a single pilot used bad CRM to force the other pilot to do something stupid, even though they both knew it was stupid. Both of those would be more common without a second pilot, general aviation is proof of that.
Not a great argument for a second pilot unless the second pilot never goes to the bathroom. The human factors involved in Germanwings 9525 didn't randomly occur during the flight, they specifically occured while the co-pilot was in the bathroom.
> Both of those would be more common without a second pilot, general aviation is proof of that
Between the reliability of piston engines versus jets to the experience of someone with a PPL versus ATP, this comparison includes far more variables than number of pilots.
> I can name any number of flights where two pilots became task saturated and flew a plane into the ground
I can do that for any value of N. The question is what the ratio is between N = 1 and N = 2, and how that has changed with evolving automation.
> where a single pilot used bad CRM to force the other pilot to do something stupid, even though they both knew it was stupid
Not really an argument for a second pilot either...
I'm not saying we have the evidence to say a single pilot is sufficient. I'm arguing that nothing you've brought up shows it's critical. That said, I'm sure we'll wait until another aviation authority pioneers the way. American aviation ceded the first-mover position decades ago.
While that's true, it is a good argument for a third pilot.
To stop one crash in decades amidst hundreds of thousands of flights per day [1]? If you place that high of a value on a human life, there are better optimisations to do first at much lower cost.
I'm just pointing out that while my parent was correct that the argument failed as a justification for two pilots, it doesn't fail for any other number. It's similar to the proof that all horses are the same color.
It doesn't fail as much as not work. One can always come up with hypotheticals justifying more redundancy. Whether that's worth the tradeoff requires actually looking at the facts.
One of the changes from that incident is that there is always a second person in the cockpit. If a pilot needs to leave the cockpit for some reason, a second crew member must come in and ensure that the pilot flying doesn’t lock the other pilot out.
As to the rest of the argument: the whole point is that two pilots is safer than one by a very large margin. We eliminated engineers, radio operators and navigators because we know have systems that do that better than a human. We do not yet have systems that do the job of pilot as well as a human. Commercial autolanding has existed since the 1960s but there are still situations where the pilot has to land the plane. We aren’t there yet.
This is an argument for offloading checklists to an automated system. Not having more pilots to run more checklists.
Return on investment not being profit for the transit system, but moreso a more extensive, faster network for riders.
the official figures here are however misleaading as their "staff" numbers only include those directly employed by TOCs and Network Rail
under "other" there's the vast army of contractors, including cleaning staff, track maintenance contractors, train maintenance contractors, private security, and so on
what's left is fuel, interest payments, depreciation, premium payments to government and some capital expenditure (not much...)
Oddly enough, you almost never see them on the trains unless someone has pushed the silent alarm.
None of the above would enable driverless trains. It’d just go towards accident reduction —maybe suicide too, depends on the individual’s determination.
Other metros around the world that have retrofitted PEDs had the advantage of having fleets of trains with standardised dimensions.
Of course, this wouldn't stop them selectively installing platform edge doors at stations that do not have this issue. The most modern lines (central section of the Elizabeth line, and the eastern section of the Jubilee line) do have PEDs.
We could still install PEDs with imprecise doors. Ie more doors than required. Larger doors than required. The main thing is for the door to only open while a train is in front of it, and all the train doors be unobstructed.
Ie won’t hurt much to have a PED open to the train wall or opens double the size of the current trains’ door.
I imagine there would be safety issues with that approach since it might create an opportunity for people to get trapped between the platform doors and the train. No sense solving one safety issue just to introduce another one. You'd also need to be sure the platform doors didn't take any longer than the train doors to open. Anything that increases boarding & alighting time, even by a second or two, would likely be rejected in London.
Make them chest height. There are no words for how much I despise guardrails that reach to below my center of gravity. I want guardrails that will stop me from tumbling over a cliff, not guardrails that will make sure that if I do go, I go headfirst.
Why would they? Paris lines 1,4, 14 and soon 15 have zero staff onboard
I can't believe that would cost billions given it has two stations and is fully underground
good leverage against the unions too...
Why? Is that some union requirement? Staff is absolutely not required on driverless trains. There can be at stations and of course for maintenance, but there's no reason to have staff in each train.