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Autonomous 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 e
by jacques_chester 7y ago
Autonomous 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.