In the city I live underground drivers hold ridiculous privileged (even compared to other underground workers) that allows positions to be effectively hereditary: children of drivers are more likely to get into the job than others.
Very true, though equally the increased risk of automated safety system stopping the train in the middle of a long tube tunnel because one of it's sensors got dirty or a rat triggered a sensor as it went splat on the tracks are things drivers can work around easier.
So if a perfectly safe and working train stops due to a sensor getting dirty quickly (which for the London tube is more likely than most places), with a driver there they could see and know that issue and safely carry on. Automation will go into health and safety mode and stop that train in the middle of nowhere needing human attention. So delays become longer.
I'd rather deal with planned outages, than longer drawn out automated random ones.
In Germany, trains have a system called "Notbremsüberbrückung" / NBÜ. This system overrides the passenger emergency brake in tunnels... basically (i'm shortening it a bit here), as soon as the last carriage leaves the platform (in an underground) or the train can't fully stop before entering a tunnel, the e-brake is disabled, and only re-enabled when the train enters a platform / exits the tunnel.
There's nothing preventing automated trains from using the same principle. Additionally, tunnels can be retrofit with cameras or motion detectors, to further prevent something larger than a rat from getting in a dangerous position.
Pre covid in the rush hour this was very common.
Though: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-19741282
Nicely sums up how the whole driveless tube/train aspect has been rumbling on for a while now.
Maintenance is crazy due to the short maintenance hours and therefore everyone getting paid enhanced rates to work 0:00 to 04:00. Significantly modernizing signalling and control would be expensive but would probably back back over time.
A few years back I was in a control room in a tube station and saw some steampunk looking machine that we assumed was related to the old destination boards on the station, which were long gone but the machine was still operational and left alone. Why? Because who would risk breaking something just to remove some random old piece of kit!
You put your finger on the real issue with the London Underground - the maintenance needs which are onerous and prevent the trains from running overnight on most nights.
I see that you hedged your point, and I'm not even disagreeing with you at all. Just an interesting thing to consider.
You can rebuild that kind of system but it’ll be exactly the same hardware behind a more modern looking panel.
Does make you wonder, if years/decades later they fully automate it, turns out cost way more than just keeping human drivers. Equally even if on paper for TFL it breaks even cost wise or cheaper, those people will still need jobs/income and may well be case of shifting that problem elsewhere in the governmental chain of things.
In the uk, train drivers unions are one of the last meaningful unions left and the right wing government hates that.
Also, London has a left wing mayor and a very good public transport system. The right wing government hate both the mayor (he's heir apparent to lead the party nationally) and the concept of public transport.
That's also the real reason private train operators were bailed out but public TfL was been hung out to dry...
So the employers were divided and the highly unionized employees were united, which meant that they did extremely well in negotiations. The membership overall are extremely loyal to their union leadership, because of how successful they've been in maintaining conditions and improving wages.
He’s not even an MP! He’s not allowed to be the leader.
As you might expect the political parties in the UK are organised differently according to their principles, so the Labour Party is an unincorporated association which only owns companies for purposes for which an informal group would be illegal (e.g. "People who come to our meetings" cannot legally own a plot of land, but "Labour Party Meetings Limited" could) while whatever the current Nigel Farage vehicle is (Reform? Brexit Party? Whatever he's calling it now) is a private company entirely owned and controlled by Nigel and his friends.
Not sure what point you're trying to make. Yes they can have whatever rules they want... and the rule they want is that the leader must be a commoner MP.
Labour could change that, but if they were to be changed, it would not be for Sadiq Khan. Maybe for Andy Burnham. Khan doesn't have enough support among Labour members. Realistically it won't be changed for either, as it would cause too many difficulties.
Maybe Heir apparent is a bit strong? He's not defonate. But I can't think of anyone else with the name recognition...
Of course he does. He has to be a commoner MP.
> The leader and deputy leader of the Party shall be elected or re-elected from among Commons members of the PLP
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Rule-Book-2...
> But he could easily be dropped into a safe seat.
Hmmm not sure how many of those they have available right now!
In this case however I think it's much more likely that if Khan is the choice, room will be found for Khan to win a byelection somewhere. Labour has plenty of London MPs still, they've struggled mostly with the North, progressive policies sell very well among socially aware people inside the M25 but aren't popular among people for whom the whole point was that the Unions ought to run the country.
In lots of Labour seats in London it really wouldn't matter who you run. That's why Vauxhall's MP used to be Kate Hoey. Nice part of London, very gay friendly, many of the people there have never eaten meat, much less gone fox hunting and of course they opposed Brexit - and yet of course Kate was pro-hunting, pro-guns, anti-gay and fiercely favoured Brexit. Why did they elect her? Because it said "Labour" next to her name and they don't do research.
Agreed on the safe seats. Corbyn/Starmer has been pretty dire for Labour.
(but of course same issue: would need to become an MP again first)
£1.8 billion in loans/grants
Yes, London got hung out to dry as usual.
Sadly London is not yet more important than the rest of the UK combined.
Maybe r/uk should kick us out as we're clearly holding you all back.
I'd love to know by what scale you consider the British government "right-wing"?
Realistically, they are all pretty centrist - at their most radical, they lean slightly one way or the other.
And yes, it does fail. Been on trains when the doors refused to open because the system failed to recognise the station. For ages, the trains also waited for ~30 seconds to open doors at London Victoria, supposedly because the system that recognised the stations used GPS, and the station concourse at Victoria is too deep for the trains to get a signal. Don't know if that is true or not, but in any case automating even door control was a long, complex project that still has issues years later.
Steps will keep being taken towards automating more of it, but there is decades old rolling stock, so any upgrades will take accordingly long to spread through the system as everything gets upgraded.
Isle of Wight for example, ran on London Underground 1938 stock trains until last year, when they started upgrading to refurbished British Rail Class 484 rolling stock built in the 1970's and 1980's...
With respect to renewables, not all of the UK network is even electrified yet...
There are many tens of billions of investment in prerequisites such as getting rid of level crossings and properly secure rail and upgrading stations and trains that'd be required before you can even think of upgrading mainline rail to driverless. For the London Underground, it means a rolling program of platform upgrades, signalling upgrades and rolling stock upgrades that'd similarly be in the many billions.
And yes, now would be the right time to finance it, but even if you start now this is just not happening in the next couple of decades, that was my point.
So by all means, it's worth starting to make the pre-requisite improvements, but it won't bring driverless trains on most of these lines anytime soon.
If we can fly drones through the deserts of Arabia why can't we drive trains remotely through the suburbs of Croydon?
It's if anything one of the worst places in the entire UK to start such a project.
The problem with what you suggest is that a ten minutes delay at East Croydon during rush hour, if you're lucky and a problem happens near a station, can easily lead to rush hour traffic from large parts of the South Coast to both London Victoria and London Bridge piling up with effects lasting for an hour or more. It's a horrible chokepoint. There are plans to fix that [1], but those plans also involve multi-year projects. In fact the planning has been going on for years at this point.
A similar issue is a problem for the London Underground - while there are fewer complex junctions, the margins are far tighter. A train that's stuck on the station for a couple of minutes can have knock on effects over a larger area.
All of this is solvable, but the costs involved in various improvements to mitigate them means it'd take a very long time before those investments would start paying off.
[1] https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/our-routes...
You'll need some storage or natural gas power plant as most renewable energy are intermittent.
Also, unless you have alternative routes, you cannot have a subway running 24/7 because maintenance needs to be done somehow.
That would be revolutionary \s
Also, track maintenance still requires service downtime, which currently happens at night.
Not sure how that works. More seriously, I am unaware of the Tube tracks being unusually old, or requiring unusual amounts of maintenance because of their age compared to other comparable systems. Have you got a source on that?
There's also the fact that the deep Tube lines only have one track per direction, in contrast to the New York Subway where there are express and local tracks so trains can be rerouted via one set of tracks while maintenance is done on the other set.
Plus, of course, the equipment needed to do maintenance on the lines usually needs to be carried by hand through stations and into the tunnels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Lines
>no one wants to pay to replace them. So every night they need... replacing
Yeah, stupid right?
Imagine a signal is broken (and TFL still used vaccume tubes for its signal systems as recently as 2010). So you have to reduce speed on the line. So now the centra-pedal forces on the corner after the speed restriction aren't enough to counter the camber of that curve. So the wheels on ever train grind down the railhead. So now you have the replace the rail (or polish it etc) much sooner than expected.
Failing to replace one part forces you to replace another part. Replacing that part uses up the time/money you have so you can't now replace the first part.
Take the central line anywhere between Bank and Stratford some time. The screaming of the wheels isn't just deafening noise. It's the actual rail being turned into dust because no one has invested a weeks closure and money to fix the rest of the infrastructure. So instead every night someone has to go check it and make sure it hasn't cracked yet...
You need so few subway drivers/conductors that does it really matter if you need one per train?
Taxis are probably average a driver per 1.5 ish customers. Subway/train is hundreds.
This reminds me of optimisation of non critical code. Sure its nice, but the cost/benefit is just not there.