Could San Francisco Automate Strike-Threatening Train Drivers?

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/17/could-bart-automate-train-drivers/

by theplaz • 13 years ago

44 49 13 years ago

enko• 13 years ago

This is a rhetorical question. Of course it could. I've ridden driverless trains in at least three countries - the technology is unquestionably available, proven, and safe.

Is it possible politically? That is the real question. Perhaps not, but let's not pretend it has anything to do with technology.

sghill• 13 years ago

It's even possible to ride a driverless train in the US, and has been at least since the Detroit People Mover[1] opened in 1987.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_People_Mover

betterunix3• 13 years ago

I cannot speak for BART, but in NYC the MTA has been trying to automate its trains for many years (since the early 90s for the latest effort) and has only barely been able to keep everything working on the one line chosen for the pilot program -- and that is one of the simpler routes in the system. While I am sure that automation is possible and that the technology is available, the MTA seems to be making all the wrong choices, and I would prefer to have human operators until some minimum technical competency can be established (we can start with this: trains that can reliably announce their position on the line, without needing a human being to set things up -- one would think this is a bare minimum for automated service).

BrandonMarc• 13 years ago

So ... lots of people have a financial stake in automated trains not working, and for some reason MTA is moving in a direction that consistently doesn't work. Quite a coincidence there.

strict9• 13 years ago

My train was halted this morning due to a man waving a gun around. Between that and other previous incidents involving other riders, I am quite grateful there was a person operating the train.

yetanotherphd• 13 years ago

I'm just guessing but I think the main difference is between building a system from scratch vs working with an existing system. While the cost of strikes is high, so is the fixed cost embedded in the current system.

icebraining• 13 years ago

I wonder if TechCrunch articles could be automated. Have the TC editors ever bothered to ask, or are they too afraid of the interests of the contributors to explore the question?

thedrbrian• 13 years ago

If everyone could just email their PR pieces to a common techcrunch email address, someone could write a bit of code to check any links and then bung the text and pictures into an article template on the homepage.

toomuchtodo• 13 years ago

Just to start (I call it BotoCrunch)

Mailgun In -> TextTeaser API [1] -> Mailgun Out to reader mailing list/Deploy to S3 site.

https://www.mashape.com/mojojolo/textteaser [1]

raldi4• 13 years ago

If there's a point behind your sarcasm, I'm not getting it. Would you mind fleshing it out a bit?

CreRecombinase• 13 years ago

Everyone else's job seems easy until you actually learn something about it.

raldi4• 13 years ago

TechCrunch has explored the topic of automated journalism numerous times; here's one example:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/automated-news-sports-stats...

rpedela2• 13 years ago

I would like to see all forms of transportation automated as long as it is proven safe. Trains have to be one of the easiest to automate since it runs on a track. If Google can automate a car which needs to avoid potholes, idiot drivers, construction, snow, rain, etc, I think we should be able to automate trains.

Anechoic• 13 years ago

If Google can automate a car which needs to avoid potholes, idiot drivers, construction, snow, rain, etc

Google hasn't done that (yet). http://googleblog.blogspot.hu/2012/08/the-self-driving-car-l...

rpedela2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the link. I stand corrected.

waylandsmithers• 13 years ago

I'm not from the bay area-- do the train operators seem to have any public support? I feel like it's hard to sympathize with striking workers who are already among the highest paid in the country for this line of work.

tsuru• 13 years ago

I'm not from the bay area either, but have you see the rent prices out there? Just seeing how much rent prices over the last 20 or so years have increased, mostly because of the tech industry, it's easier for me to sympathize with them.

thaumasiotes3• 13 years ago

Speaking as someone who tried to use the godawful abomination that is Caltrain, I have no sympathy for any Caltrain employees, and never will.

You could replace the entire staff with San Francisco homeless and it couldn't get any worse.

xargs• 13 years ago

The most recent polls show 68-77% of the public are against yet another union strike. In terms of general public opinion, there are, of course, contingents of uber-liberal/uber-conservitive outliers on either end; but the majority of the public are simply fed up with what is perceived as an increasingly petty and entrenched stalemate with little transparency as to what is actually being negotiated.

BART employees and their unions say salaries are too low for the (high) cost of living in the area, and should be increased by 23% to correct that. However, BART (and increasingly, the public) argue that BART jobs require no technical skills or education (beyond a HS diploma) and are benefitted and secure jobs already paying far above the average wage for jobs of similar (low) skill levels; and in light of the context (economic and otherwise), only a 4% raise should be granted. The percentage raise rates have gone back and forth on both ends, but that's the general gist.

source (on the 68-77% strike disapproval): http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2013/10/10/bart...

billmalarky• 13 years ago

The cost of living in SF is outrageous.

sdfjkl3• 13 years ago

They should be. Artificially keeping jobs alive that are better, safer and cheaper performed by machines is bad for everyone in the long run, even the train drivers.

parasight• 13 years ago

So let's train the train drivers to be train automation experts.

ProblemFactory• 13 years ago

BART is already almost automated: the train drives itself. The "drivers" only close the door, and stop the train if something unexpected happens. Some other light rail systems around the world run with no drivers on board at all.

The progress of automation will certainly result in complex social issues, and the entire concept of employment may have to be rethought.

But keeping a small number of people pointlessly in their old jobs is not the right solution. Why should a few people receive $66-92k per year in welfare just because they used to drive a train, while other unemployed people and the homeless do not? It would be more fair to share the tax funds between all unemployed, regardless of whether it was due to a new automated train system or not.

jotm• 13 years ago

On the other hand, it's as close to a minimum basic income as the US (and probably the world) will get this decade :-)

pitt19802• 13 years ago

you want to explain why its better for train drivers to be out of a job?

creative destruction might be better for the system as a whole,

that's different than saying there aren't winners and losers, only winners

the further we go down the wormhole of automating away work, that's a question we shouldn't just blow off

sdfjkl3• 13 years ago

Same reason for anyone in that situation: The sooner they learn/do something else, the sooner they can acquire a new useful skillset, instead of dragging on their now useless one. It's not like this is an intermediate problem and if we just subsidize them long enough, there'll suddenly be a need for train drivers again.

melling• 13 years ago

The technology already exists. Take the money that's saved and invest it back into the system. Run trains more frequently and have them run 24 hours.

http://www.bart.gov/guide/latenight.aspx

dllthomas2• 13 years ago

My understanding has been that the a significant role of a BART driver is crowd control as people get on and off. Some of that seems less automatable than the travel itself. I could easily be wrong about that, though, or automating the rest might be worth doing anyway.

jrockway3• 13 years ago

BART is already automated. The "drivers" just make announcements, check that the doors don't close on someone's leg, and press the emergency stop button if the computer goes badly awry.

thrillgore• 13 years ago

This is the same kind of "automation" that is in place at most mass transit systems in the US (sans DC, which still uses human operators).

The requirement of having that human operator is typically born strictly of labor requirements first, and not necessarily the need of having someone's hand over the "Oh shit" button.

betterunix3• 13 years ago

Sans New York also -- with one exception, all of the MTA's trains have human operators, and the majority have two-man crews. It has been possible for a single person to operate the MTA's subway trains for decades, but attempts to do so on "full length" trains (most lines; shuttles and the G are the main exceptions) have generally resulted in failures to meet safety requirements e.g. evacuating passengers quickly enough during a fire. It is overly simplistic to claim that this is strictly about labor requirements; while the TWU certainly works to keep its members employed, there are many other factors, at least in NYC. Also notable are the various attempts to increase automation, which have failed not because of the union, nor because of technology not being up to the task, but because the MTA does not know how to hire competent engineers for its projects (despite having billions of dollars available to pay them).

mapt• 13 years ago

The 'Oh shit' button is not something we can reasonably expect the driver of a 'partially' automated train to be able to press: humans just aren't good at maintaining attention for these sorts of tasks with half-second reaction times once every fifty years of service. They can occasionally make useful decisions about edge-cases that represent small chances of failure (like wet-rail operation), that it is possibly for the automated operators to fail to account for.

The human driver instead serves as a sort of last-ditch assurance that the transit company values human life sufficient that a jury wouldn't destroy them in the event of an accident. He performs a sacrificial function by being the first one to die in the event of a crash, at which point it becomes a tragedy for the operator company, milliseconds before the people behind him die, at which point it becomes a tragedy for the passengers. There is no point, therefore, at which a disaster can be seen as a tragedy for the passengers but not the operating company, a position which is fraught with political-legal consequences in the US corporate and municipal environment, ever obsessed with liability. The driver's failure to respond adequately is implied to be at least partially the fault of the late driver, sufficient to draw fire until the panic dies down.

Absent liability issues, we would all be riding perfectly safe labor-less cars and trains, which were perfectly safe because we insisted on using them once they were mature enough to be safer than individual automobile drivers, and learned from each crash that happened afterwards, and improved our algorithms iteratively. Instead, every time we have a crash we blame the algorithm's existence rather than tweak it, switch to using a more human-intensive mode, let the automated infrastructure rot, add weight to our trains, and decry the tragic no-fault coincidence of driver inattention and algorithm failure that doomed the driver and the passengers.

The DC Metro was designed for full automation. Rather than implement the automation and improve on it over time, the predictable initial failures resulted in scaling back the automation partially and later fully and now it's not even a realistic capability, the infrastructure has degraded.

jrockway3• 13 years ago

I don't know of many other heavy-rail systems where the control system has full authority over the control of the train. Most systems can stop the train if the operator exceeds the safety limits, but it's up to the operator to do routine things like stop at a station, open the doors, and accelerate away from the station.

raldi4• 13 years ago

Interesting comment, but it would be a lot intererestinger with a citation attached.

cpeterso• 13 years ago

  "BART was one of the first U.S. systems of any size to have substantial automated 
  operations. The trains are computer-controlled via BART's Operations Control Center 
  (OCC) and headquarters at Lake Merritt and generally arrive with regular punctuality."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Bay_Area_Rapid_...

sdfjkl3• 13 years ago

Same for London's DLR (Docklands Light Railway). I remember whe the drivers went on strike, the trains simply ran without the babysitters. Nobody died or lost any limbs that day.

al2o3cr• 13 years ago

Shorter TC: "Hey, that crab is near the top of the bucket! PULL HIM DOWN!"

gadders• 13 years ago

Tangential point: I once got speaking to a taxi driver who used to be a tube driver. He said if you ever want to commit suicide, do it on the Victoria line. Although the traines have a driver in the cab, they are automated so the driver will be paying less attention and less likely to stop in time.

I'm not sure how this came up in conversation.

afreak• 13 years ago

This could be answered as yes and also no.

Since 1985, Vancouver has had a 100% automated metro system ("SkyTrain") which has expanded to three lines (soon 4) and about 65 KM in track (soon to be closer to 80).

Almost any metro system could be converted to be automated but SkyTrain was built to be 100% computer-controlled from the get go. To switch from manual to electronic control would likely lead to enormous interruptions and it is unlikely that the unions in charge would accept it. It also isn't a matter of just updating the trains but it also means building sensors at all stations to detect intrusions and it also means changing signal controls. Needless to say it would be a bad idea and likely would just cost money.

In 2001, we suffered a prolonged transit strike that stopped all local bus and ferry service. However, the SkyTrain system continued to operate as normal albeit without any staff at any of the stations.

theplaz2• 13 years ago

If BART became automated they could afford to run more trains, especially later at night, as they do in Vancouver: http://www.humantransit.org/2010/02/driverless-rapid-transit...

theplaz2• 13 years ago

Plus there is the zoom and whoosh factor, which BART already has: http://www.humantransit.org/2010/01/transits-zoomwhoosh-prob...

Could San Francisco Automate Strike-Threatening Train Drivers?

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