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Very good point with the degraded working. In a train serving hundreds of passengers (or many dozens of truckloads), running on something that is literally as e
by usrusr 7y ago
Very good point with the degraded working. In a train serving hundreds of passengers (or many dozens of truckloads), running on something that is literally as expensive to maintain as a whole rail network, the cost saved by cutting the driver is just not worth the extra hassle and delay in edge cases. Perhaps it is much more meaningful to think of that person as the engineer on duty than as a driver.
- jacques_chester 7y agoAutonomous rail has probably racked up billions of passenger-kilometres by now. The edge cases are pretty thin and it's unlikely that a human driver will have equivalent levels of accumulated experience. The most reliable line in the MTA, for example, is the L train. It is also the closest to fully autonomous (due to union rules, there is a driver who turns it on and then "supervises" the train).
- usrusr 7y agoI use a driverless subway almost daily. And it's rare, but not not terribly rare to see the fallback driver panel in use. It works because a fallback driver can be deployed in minutes, which is very much not true with the distances spanned by heavy rail. Regarding the L train, how much would service suffer if the "supervisor" wasn't there to clean up whatever is left by reliability nines? We may never know. And it is hardly surprising that a recently modernized line is beating the living history museum that is the rest of the MTA. It's quite a leap to go from modernization causing reliability to automation causing reliability.