Adam is an international treasure
I’m really tickled by the fact that we can’t fully automate trains yet. I never thought about it, but put into perspective how asinine self-driving cars are if we can’t achieve the same thing with a train, something that is vastly more tractable and less chaotic than road traffic.
The video actually mentions why it’s not quite possible yet, but it’s slowly moving towards that direction. It’s just that the EU train system is very FUBAR’d due to all the 20th century conflicts
If what you took away from that is “EU trains are FUBAR because something something conflicts” then you weren’t paying attention. Automating trains isn’t that hard to do (London’s Victoria Line has been more or less self-driving since 1967) with some kind of transponders-and-in-cab-control arrangement, but they still to this day have to have a train operator (i.e., a driver) in the cab. This is not because the automation can’t make the train go and make it stop again at the right place, it’s because actually pushing a lever back and forth is only a tiny part of the job of driving a train. The rest is about knowing rules many of which are extremely safety-critical, evaluating rules, and applying knowledge and experience to make sure those rules are correctly applied. For instance, you can put a passenger train on a fenced-off track with no intermittent route changes and it can drive itself from A to B using existing technology. The problem, however, is what happens if something goes wrong? A wire connecting a trackside transponder fails – the train will stop because it doesn’t know what to do. A foreign body is detected on the track in front? The train will have to stop until someone moves it. And not only that train will be stopped, but all the trains behind it will be stopped until someone can get there in person… and let’s hope they don’t have to use the strech of track that’s blocked to get there.
So you still need a human on the train to resolve these problems - a signal failure means a two-way conversation with the signalbox to confirm what’s going on and get given manual permission to proceed, usually at a reduced speed. A foreign object can be examined on the spot, moved if the driver is able to do so, and the track checked over to make sure it hasn’t been damaged by the impact. And this is a very simple example. Driving a train is one of those jobs (a lot like being a pilot, and few people seem to be talking about getting rid of airline pilots) which is 99% routine but 1% exceptions, and the possible number of exceptions is nearly infinite. Automation in the cab is certainly a useful thing just as automation in your car is a useful thing and for the same reason - it frees up expensive human eyeballs and brains to worry less about the repetitive mechanics of the 99% routine so they can pay more attention to any potential 1% exceptions coming down the line. Automation simply can’t meet the safety requirements – there’s no “acceptable number” of accidents or fatalities in railway operations unless that number is zero.
There are, to be fair, some extremely niche operations where full automation can and does work – mostly on isolated metro systems where the infrastructure is expansive enough, there are no level crossings, and the line operates effectively in a vacuum. Even in that case, the Victoria Line can’t meet the safety requirements as the tunnels have no side walkways and passenger evacuation means walking people off through the middle of the cab onto what have to be assumed to be live electrical rails without going through complex safety procedures to be sure they’re safe.
Railway safety in Europe is nothing like what a lot of people think it is (i.e., akin to highway safety). It’s taken very, very seriously and no compromises are ever acceptable. Even many rules which seem hard to explain today exist because a massively improbable series of failures at some point in the past caused disaster or near-disaster and could still repeat themselves today if not for this rule. It’s complex, sure, but for a system that’s undergone 200 years of continuous evolution and development and still remains extremely safe it’s anything but FUBAR.
Other thing to add to this is that there’s just one or two people in the train providing service for hundreds of other people or millions of dollars worth of goods. Automating those people away is simply not economical, not even in terms of the headcount replaced vs headcount that has to be hired to maintain the automation software and hardware.
Unless you’re a techbro, who deeply resents labor, someone who would rather hire 10 software engineers than 1 train driver.
mostly on isolated metro systems where the infrastructure is expansive enough, there are no level crossings, and the line operates effectively in a vacuum.
Also, critically, metro systems are relatively “dense”, so you can have a human respond to an exception quickly - you’re always in a populated area with not much space between individual stations.
I’m also wondering what the ROI is on automation costs and maintenance thereafter versus paying a conductor to just drive the thing.
In Copenhagen, the metro is fully automated and there are discussions of doing the same with the commuter rail (all grade separated). I think the more interesting benefit to the commuter rail is they will run closer together in time and run more frequently at night (every 10 vs 20 or 30 minutes)… But I don’t think the financials would ever really pay for the upgrades needed…
The DLR is driverless, but there’s continuous remote monitoring. (There’s continuous remote monitoring on all the lines, of course. With chat back and forth with the driver. My wife used to work on the Tube doing this - Line Information Assistant, occasional Line Controller - so I have heard all the after-shift rants.)
A Tube driver’s real job is largely safety inspection, with a side order of driving a train.
a couple years back I recall seeing some interesting stuff re the nyc subway (link1, link2)
leaving aside how hilariously far they’ve overrun constructions and estimations (wow nyc is bad at this), it was kinda wild to learn that they didn’t even know where trains were during operation. made perfect sense in context with the info, but still wild
This sort of thing is so common that it even has a name: gadgetbahn.
How deep inside your own ass do you have to be to propose MODERNISING THE ENTIRE RAILWAY NETWORK to be a viable solution to anything?
That’s a Polish company apparently. My fellow compatriots, you fucking know how rail operates in Poland. We bought high-speed trains that couldn’t go at any high speed because there weren’t any actual rails that would allow them to. Whenever there is even small maintenance work of a small tract of the network half of the fucking country is ground to a standstill. Honestly, building a whole new separate rail system for your invention would be a MORE REASONABLE proposition, it probably wouldn’t be much more expensive, and wouldn’t paralyse the existing network.
This sounds like a great setup for an episode of “Well There’s Your Problem.”
Are these guys any relation to that “Newag” outfit that tried to brick a train after detecting a third-party repair?
doesn’t seem so, but they do brag about their involvement in related startup “Hyper Poland” (it’s about hyperloop clone or something like that) and some of Musk’s business. CEO is a finbro manager, but they seem to have some actual engineers and some people that worked in railway industry in the past. deeply unserious overall
This guy has like a billion videos that are just some variation of “Here’s a tech bro startup making a gadgetbahn and here’s why it wouldn’t work and trains are a thousand times better”. Great that it exists, but since these startups never learn from others’ mistakes and thus keep making the same missteps over and over and over again, it makes the videos very samey after a while. Not sure what I would do in his position.
That’s not true, he also takes down libertarian seasteaders, and dictator vanity projects just as much. Also, it’s not his fault that trains are the superior form of transportation we know of.
“Deep tech startup” == very good at digging deep in public infrastructure funds, presumably
