I'm not sure, though, that dumb train control is necessarily the answer. The Chicago system looks pretty dumb (though I know nothing about it), certainly no more complex than the New York system, but the fact that the CTA system self-reset seems to imply it cannot be safe without a human in the cab. This misfeature is a problem regardless how dumb or complex the signal system is.

Also, my hometown has one of the world's first automatic train operation systems (BART), and to my knowledge it hasn't had a revenue service malfunction leading to a crash since October 2 1972, less than a month after it opened. However, the train control system did lead to a good deal of litigation and project timeline overruns. I think the take-home lesson is that brand new technology is extraordinarily painful to debug and deploy; it's always going to be better to re-use train control that someone else debugged on their railway rather than re-inventing the wheel for your project.