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Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

A related BBC news article is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-29520761

Including comment from the RMT Union about how they are "deeply concerned" about driverless operation, the "lethal and cash driven nonsense of removing drivers"

Well... driverless operation may be "cash-driven", and TFL s often focusing on savings over performance (e.g by removing staff from ticket and information booths) but "lethal" sounds like a slur. Driverless trains work well enough on the DLR in East London, and are probably an inevitable step in 21st century London.

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Works well in lots of places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

Of course people whose jobs are affected by these systems will speak ill of it, I'm sure the carriage drivers union wasn't very pleased with the automobile back in the day either. We will see the same thing for trucks and cabs real soon.

Keep in mind section "Systems and lines with ATO and human driver (Grade of Automation 2)": most tube lines are already automated (to a point), it's just that there's still someone seating there at the helm.

I'm guessing that's why danielbln linked specifically to the Grade 4 section, rather than the whole article.

Victoria, Central and Jubilee are all "driverless". But they have drivers. There are actual reasons for this.

What "actual reasons" aside from inertia? The section danielbln linked to are UTO, they're fully automated and unattended (some of the trains don't even have a driver cabin, passengers can seat at the very front of the train) and most have been running for years if not decades without incidents (that I know of).

RMT (the union) mainly (there may be actual technical reasons too for some lines, but any technical reasons are likely to largely be a result of knowing that there's no point in investing too aggressively in enabling full automation if they won't be able to make full use of it). Notice the page takes care to point out that current drivers jobs are safe.

It's likely that London Underground is basically betting it'll be easier to just hire at less than the replacement rate and gradually automate more and more rather than risk massive conflict with the RMT for years.

Care to share any?

Reasons I can think of:

Existing automation may be insufficiently good to cope with adverse weather and unplanned situations. Technology has moved on considerably since the Victoria, Central and Jubilee stock. We're automating cars now, after all. The article mentions a new signalling system being rolled out in support.

Lack of platform-edge doors. TfL have stated they won't run driverless trains without these. These are planned for installation on the Piccadilly line as part of the new stock rollout.

The line is equipped with an Automatic Train Operation system (ATO); the train operator (driver) closes the train doors and presses a pair of "start" buttons, and if the way ahead is clear, the ATO drives the train at a safe speed to the next station and stops it there. This system has operated since the line opened in 1968, making the Victoria line the world's first full-scale automatic railway.[20]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_line

Platform edge doors is definitely part of it - people get stuck in the gap, children fall through, there's few practical driverless systems that can cope with that. Yet there are some places - e.g. Central line - where the gap is almost a foot between train and platform. The doors aren't the only problem, it's the whole carriage, on those curved sections.

One of the actual reasons is that drivers go through intensive training (er...) as first-call engineers.

If a fault stops a train, it's far more useful to have someone on the scene to try emergency repairs than to wait until the train can be cleared from a tunnel - because a stopped train can literally hold up the commute of millions of people.

There are also safety issues. Drivers are trained in passenger management, and every so often they need that training to deal with fights, illness, suicides, or all the other messy things that happen on a public transport system - the public part of that being at least as important as the transport part.

  Drivers are trained in passenger management, and every so 
  often they need that training to deal with fights, 
  illness, suicides, or all the other messy things that 
  happen on a public transport system

As I understand it in a lot of the London trains it's not possible to move between carriages - so the driver can only deal with fights, illness, suicides etc over CCTV or by stopping at a station?

There are doors but they are not for use in normal circumstances. The new Victoria Line trains were initially supposed to be "space trains", open all the way through, but didn't actually end up getting built like that.

Unions?

Only one Union: The mighty RMT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Union_of_Rail,_Maritim...

it was until recently headed by the late great Bob Crow http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26527325

I work in Canary Wharf. I'm more than familiar with the RMT :-)

The 14th line in Paris is driverless I believe. With automated doors on decks I don't think there was a single life critical incident. Wikipedia reports a bunch of system locks before 2007. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligne_14_du_m%C3%A9tro_de_Paris...

This article says http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2007/08/29/les-suicides-du-metro-... not a single incident has been reported last year.

That said I wonder how much of it is due to the decks door.

With added benefit that it is strike free, the line works later at night ... I wish none of the employees to be jobless or worse, but it's hard to justify using people to drive metros.

> That said I wonder how much of it is due to the decks door.

I'm sure they help (if only psychologically), but the Lyon line D doesn't have quay doors and it's been running fully automatically since 1992. The only incident I know of is a drunk person falling on top of the metro (trying to jump from a mezzanine to the quay and missing) and hitting a camera in a tunnel. No death.

I get that building a _new_ automated metro is easy. Converting an _older_ line to automatic and fully driverless is what's hard. AFAIK, there's only one conversion so far to full auto: Line 1 in Paris. It took 10 years and billions of euro to deliver (it's a total success though) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Métro_Line_1#Automation

Interestingly, it seems the main obstacle is software - contractors are few, code is highly specific, ISO certification and warranty issues are very unattractive.

Very interested how TfL will approach this. They're really good at what they do, even at communicating (responsive website!). Don't think anybody does it better.

They're [trying](http://www.automaattimetro.fi/en) to do that in Finland. The cost is around 170 million euros now, even though the projected cost was 100 million.

On the topic of automating train functions, one of my biggest pet peeves is when the conductor is responsible for [inaudibly, or plain just not] announcing stops. DC and NYC are really irritating...NYC is automating it on some lines though.

Wow, this is still not automated in DC and NYC? I don't remember a time when it was not automated in Vienna.

London's mostly awful when the drivers are doing it, but I believe they've been automating more and more lines with stop announcements

And yet the Docklands Light Railway, also in London, and also under TfL control (though operation is outsourced to Serco, soon to be Keolis/Amey) has run without drivers (but with "train captains") for its entire history, over 25 years. And it does travel underground in places.

Did they always have train captains ? I know there have been incidents (like a gang of kids chasing someone onto the tracks to be run over), that might have made them introduce "train captains".

According to Wikipedia they've always had them. Doesn't having someone like this on the train mean it's not really "driverless"?

To a point. They walk up and down the train, do the door opening / closing, check tickets here and there, and occasionally drive the train (though it always seems painfully slow when under manual control).

I don't know how they'd do it on the tube. Presumably door closing would still require manual control.

> Presumably door closing would still require manual control.

What for? The doors can be on a timer (station-specific if necessary)

People getting stuck in doors, holding doors open, etc. etc. - though I wonder if it would be more efficient to have a person per train or a person per platform for that.

Indeed - quite a lot of stations already have platform staff for checking doors and notifying the driver that it's OK to close. I suppose it would depend on the ratio of active trains to stations as it which is most efficient. I believe TfL have committed to manning all stations after the closure of ticket offices so having platform dispatch staff may be a useful use of labour.

That did occur to me after I posted - someone on the platform would be much more useful - able to directions to people, etc.

Vancouver's Canada Line (fully automated) opens the doors fully and then tries to slowly close them if it detects an obstruction. A similar system could be in place.

They'd probably never close in some stations, like Victoria at rush hour :-)

Yeah there's attendants at every station, they're just not always out on the platforms. I've seen them bitch people out for doing it. There's also announcements really frequently telling people not to hold doors.

I asked a PSA why it's slow and she told me that when under manual operation the train is "off the grid", so to speak, and is speed limited for safety reasons (other trains no longer know where it is)

The door closing works well for the DLR -- the PSA checks all the doors are clear and then shuts them all at once. This probably isn't viable for a tube because platforms are smaller and more congested.

Just an anecdote: I use the DLR multiple times per day and after a few years using it I finally got stuck on a door the other day. I pushed the button to open the door, it started opening and when it was around 80% opened, I was entering the carriage, when it suddenly closed really fast. I got sandwiched on my shoulders and then on my right foot. The door didn't open, I had to force myself to remove the damn foot painfully. It did hurt. Can't imagine what could happen if it was someone weaker (like a child or an elderly). Oh, and my red snickers turned black.

They definitely had them before that incident (which was at Shadwell IIRC).

SideburnsOfDoom mentioned that:

> Driverless trains work well enough on the DLR in East London, and are probably an inevitable step in 21st century London.

He / she edited after I replied.

My apologies. Most of my edits are to fix typos or for sentence clarity, but I did add that part just after submitting the first version.

> "lethal" sounds like a slur.

It is. There are dozens of ways to make automated trains as safe as or safer than driven ones, Lyon's line D has been fully automated for more than 20 years (since 1992), doesn't even use platform-side doors, and AFAIK the only incident so far was somebody falling on the train itself (dead drunk and trying to jump from a mezzanine to the quay) and hitting a camera in the tunnels in 2010 (the person was lucky and survived)

You're right - driverless trains can work very well. We've had them for 12 years in Copenhagen serving currently 22 stations, and they run smoothly with just 3 minutes between each train. In the first six months of operation back in 2002 there were a few problems (delays and such), but after that everything has been smooth (and no accidents to my knowledge).

I don't know about how TFL will do it, but WMATA in Washington, DC did and will employ the same number of people under automatic operation as it does under manual operation. They were mostly just there to watch for problems and open the doors, but they were still employed (which should make the union happy).

Interestingly, the crash that made WMATA stop automatic operation[1] would not have been avoided by manual operation. The operator would've seen the same suggested speed that the train did, and wouldn't have been able to stop any sooner.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2009_Washington_Metro_tra...

Including comment from the RMT Union about how they are "deeply concerned" about driverless operation, the "lethal and cash driven nonsense of removing drivers"

I suspect that if there were an Elevator Operator's Union, they would have said the same thing when elevators became sophisticated enough to be operated by a single button press.

Pfff I can't believe they're doing this. This is taking a tiny step in optimizing it. If we're eliminating train drivers, why do we even bother with having carriages ? Why can't I just get on a train at any station I want, and have it take me to any other station I want, ideally directly to street level ?

I understand in 1798 why they went with one locomotive and lots of carriages. The engine is too expensive. One driver per carriage is not feasible. Great. All of those are eliminated. Electric motors are cheaper than "real" breaks, so every 2 wheels have an electric motor anyway. And if you have to have them, people power the train using the lots of small motors, because that means no big engine in the first carriage.

But given that you need those things, why can't we just have every carriage be it's own "train" ? Why can't every carriage just have the destination that would be most convenient at that moment in time ?

Why can't London subway be a traffic-immune taxi service ? Now THAT, I want.

> Why can't every carriage just have the destination that would be most convenient at that moment in time ?

Because subway lines are fixed, have little branching and your carriage can't magically jump from one line to the other? Having independent carriages would mostly be messier, for no advantage.

Either they're fixed, or they have "little branching". Not both.

Capacity. Legally we require a certain level of safety/signalling on the tube (and for good reason, given how bad a crash in a tube tunnel can be - after the Moorgate crash it took firefighters four days just to reach the front of the train). It's impossible to (legally) run trains closer than about two minutes apart. If you can only run one train every two minutes, then to take the number of people needed, you want trains as long as possible (e.g. Crossrail, which will use trains with about twice the capacity of Underground trains).

Likewise "operational separation" of different lines is key to reliability, both to ensure incidents on one line don't affect service on another, and because points are subject to a lot more wear and tear than plain track (see the current disruption to south London rail services, caused by a cracked crossover at Lewisham). Going forward TfL is trying to move towards a network of simple, self-contained end-to-end lines, e.g. by separating the Northern line into two independent lines rather than one line with five branches.

The kind of thing you're describing is in operation elsewhere in London where the capacity requirements make it more appropriate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_(rapid_transit)

Then do what most modern systems are moving to anyway : eliminate the track. Work with just bog standard roads in the tunnels and eliminate the rails, built and maintained like any other road.

I feel all of those problems are solvable, and it would be a huge improvement. The fact that railways have multiple lines is at least half the reason I don't want to use them. Same with the tube.

Today, using the tube is torture. Constant interchanges, deep long extremely crowded hallways, and it's getting worse every year. Why can't that be fixed ?

There's nothing "bog standard" about underground roads of that length. Unsignalled vehicles would not be safe (IMO it would be reasonable to relax some safety constraints on the british railway to increase capacity - it would save more lives by taking people off the road - but that would be politically unacceptable; people respond irrationally to major disasters). Unguided vehicles wouldn't fit down the current tunnels. And vehicles with emissions would require much more ventilation than currently exists for the deep tunnels. So you'd need something like a guided trolleybusway with custom vehicles, you'd still need some equivalent of pointwork for the electrical supply, and the vehicles probably couldn't be as heavy or as fast as rail ones.

I don't think I'm advocating unsignalled. Just put the signalling into a distributed system into the trains themselves. Since those vehicles can actually see what's in front of them, that should be a lot safer, since signalling systems are effectively blind (that's where the disasters tend to happen. The central system wasn't aware of, say a broken connection that put a switchboard into an unexpected position).

I'm convinced this can be made safer than central signalling.

As for the vehicle sizes, I'm sure whatever size vehicle is necessary could simply be constructed, and the article on wikipedia for mentions that you could have battery-powered vehicles with rapid charging at stations, negating the cost of having and maintaining dynamic (moving ?) electricity connections throughout the tunnels.

Modern ERTMS involves the system knowing where all the vehicles are; a centralized system will be more efficient than a distributed one if all the information is available. I don't think that's a fair characterization of British train disasters; the only one I can think of that involved a signalling failure is the Clapham Junction crash, in which the wires were connected wrong - and connecting the wires wrong will break any system.

A vehicle the size of an 800-person tube train wouldn't be able to get round the tube corners without rails, and how could you negotiate a destination that made sense for that many people?

> Why can't London subway be a traffic-immune taxi service ?

The system you purpose would not be traffic-immune. A large train full of people is incredibly efficient. You are describing autonomous cars, which will be great and given the the size and number of roads they don't need to match the efficiency or rail lines.

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