Why DC's Metro Wants to Automate Its Trains

They keep talking about the automation... but it feels like at least half the money will be spent enclosing the tracks.

Its a pity people can't keep their shit together, to the degree where this is semi-necessary for the three or four incidents a year this is meant to prevent.

Taking the amazing brutalist concrete heavy form of the metro and throwing some ugly plastic barriers up, carving up the space, is going to be a huge loss imo. It's amazing feeling like you are on such a chamber, and now you'll be in a crowded alley, cut off from the space around you.

It's wild how this is sold. The automation is not the real story here, is a cover story. This sort of safety-ification is happening everywhere. There are some beautiful bridges over our Rock Creek Park, that feel so amazing to cross. Those are having huge severe fences put up. They decided nets wouldn't be ok, because the people in the park would sort of see them, so it's huge entrapping fences.

It makes me really sad seeing society have to cordon itself in, enclose itself. The metro, the Duke Ellington Bridge: these had some real majesty to these experiences, felt amazing. But society demands it's securities. Fence the world in. I'm being a bit callous, but I find this such a sad indicator, such a bad shift for the world, people being cut off from such rare spatial connections.