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Driver-less trains time scale... (Metro)

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NotATrainspott

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In what way ?

Full manual control till Elephant. Press ATO button at Elephant. Unit drives itself to St Pancras/Kentish.

How will it transition and what 'guidance' will it give ? I was speaking to someone who was on the test trip and when the Driver moves the controller the ATO drops out.

Cheers in advance.

As I recall, the guidance comes from a sophisticated Driver Advisory System which knows about the ATO on the core. While the driver is actually in control outside of the core, the on-board computers tell them how to drive so that they'll slot straight into their path. Otherwise, the transition from a fully traditional railway into ATO would be problematic, due to trains arriving a few seconds early or late. DAS systems like these have been fitted to lots of different fleets of trains as they help timekeeping and energy efficiency without requiring expensive infrastructure changes.
 
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ComUtoR

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As I recall, the guidance comes from a sophisticated Driver Advisory System which knows about the ATO on the core.

Ok. I wasn't seeing the DAS as part of ATO. As (a) it can be ignored and (b) is used any and everywhere rather than as specifically for the ATO.

Still very new to me. Many thanks for the reply.
 

142094

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Looking for some advice.

I have recently passed my psychometrics and just waiting for confirmation of either being given a start date or being put in the holding pool to train as a driver for tyne and wear metro service.

My question is- What is the general opinion on how far away this type service is from being driver-less? or Light rail in the UK in general?

Im in a very stable career with prospects at the moment, its not quite driver money but its getting there. Becoming a driver is a dream for me but also a risk. i dont want to find in 10 years time computer automation being retro fitted into all stock and im out of a job! - iv got 35 years before i can retire!

Any advice would be appreciated or links to some relevant articles.
Thanks

We haven't got the money to run enough trains reliably as it is on the Metro so driverless will never happen before I retire. And that is in about 30 years.
 

zaax

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The problem is that we are very close to driverless road vehicles, heavy good vehicles may start platooning with-in the year & if the public accepts driverless road vehicles they will happily accept driverless trains.
 

Billy A

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The problem is that we are very close to driverless road vehicles, heavy good vehicles may start platooning with-in the year & if the public accepts driverless road vehicles they will happily accept driverless trains.

I don't think driverless road vehicles on anything other than a few roads (motorways and dual carriageways meeting whatever the requirements might be) are anywhere near as ready as some were saying only a year or two ago. At the moment we can have at least short term autonomous driving such as the misleadingly named Autopilot system that Tesla offer but that only works on some roads and even then requires driver input. It's the idea that your car will drive itself away happily until some unplanned-for emergency breaks out whereupon it delegates control back to a driver who probably hasn't a clue what's going on as (s)he has spent the past ten minutes asleep/doing the crossword/on social media that has been realised to be a much bigger issue than some autonomous driving enthusiasts had anticipated.
 

jon0844

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I'm not sure we're that close to driverless vehicles. Vehicles that can automate a lot of functions, yes, but still needing a driver to take over for quite a while yet.

There are lots of things to sort out even if a car can already match the speed of other traffic and hold a lane, or park and other individual functions.

A train would be easier as it's a more controlled environment, but there are still things that would require a driver do I doubt they'd ever go completely. Might get paid less though.
 
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eman_resu

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We may be technically close to driver less cars, the lawyers are only just starting to talk about who could be fault from an accident, the computer or the driver that was given only a few seconds (maybe) to wake up, gather themselves and then grab the steering wheel....

I personally always want a driver, or a pilot for that matter, at the front, that loves their family more than I love mine. :D
 

Bletchleyite

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The problem is that we are very close to driverless road vehicles, heavy good vehicles may start platooning with-in the year & if the public accepts driverless road vehicles they will happily accept driverless trains.

The public already do accept driverless trains. I never heard of anyone who was scared of going on the DLR. And the ATO Tube lines are basically the same thing but with the "guard" up front in the cab.

Staffless trains may be harder to accept (and personally I would rather keep the staff but have them doing things of more benefit to the passenger i.e. "guard only operation"), but "GOO" (with the "guard" being skilled to drive in emergency like on the DLR, on a degraded, low-speed, on-sight basis) would have many benefits over DOO. Some trains would also benefit from two guards, such as evening services with known trouble.
 
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ComUtoR

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The public already do accept driverless trains. I never heard of anyone who was scared of going on the DLR. And the ATO Tube lines are basically the same thing but with the "guard" up front in the cab.

I would challenge that the public 'already do'. I am often surprised how many people do not know that the DLR or the Tube is automated. On the Tube you see someone sitting up the front. To many, that is the Driver. I wouldn't be surprised that if a poll was carried out if the real numbers came out a lot lower than expected. Even until recently, I didn't know how extensive ATO really is.
 

Emblematic

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As is often the case, you just have to follow the money. Driverless vehicles will happen, because there are huge financial gains to be made. HGV drivers are a huge problem for the logistics industry, they are in short supply (most drivers are over 50, many over 60, and licence applications continue to fall.) Drivers need to take breaks and have limited hours, loads get parked up all over the place, casing delay and loss. Tech companies like Amazon and Uber are looking to automate their whole businesses. Driverless personal cars are a sideshow compared to this, but I would certainly buy one once the technology is proven.
There's nothing like these savings on the railway. Each driver already moves a huge load of people or freight, and the public are not primed to accept staffless trains. So other than isolated systems like the DLR, I see the railways keeping the driver for a long time yet.
 

notverydeep

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As a risk to the employment of current train drivers, automation of rail vehicles is not a medium term threat. As others on this thread have said the most you have to worry about is an ‘attended ATO’ type system with ERTMS. There are currently no firm plans to go beyond this and even on Metros, full unattended automatic operation (GOA4) is only being investigated and is not committed on that kind of time scale.

However, automation of their own vehicles could end up being the least of a railway workers worries late next decade. The key threat is from fully Autonomous Road Vehicles (ARVs) that don't require a driver in attendance or anyone else on board.

Development of these is continuing apace, mainly in the US, where the interests of the workers likely to be displaced carries less weight. For sure, they are not ready yet. Significant problems remain to be worked through, such as the avoidance of ‘over caution’ and the ability to deal with adverse weather such as heavy rain, ice and snow. Sceptics tend to portray these issues as insurmountable or point to red herrings as show stoppers, such as choosing who to hit in an accident; anyone who believes a human driver ever gets this choice in the split second before a crash has never had an accident.

In reality the efforts to overcome these issues are very well funded and employing many hundreds of researchers and are making good progress. Regulatory models that deal with safety and liability are being established and these will end up serving as models for the rest of the world. If I had to guess fully unattended vehicles are four to seven years from wide spread roll out in the US. Be in no doubt though, when unattended ARVs are rolled out in the US, others, including the UK won’t want to be too far behind.

The UK rail industry in so far as it has thought about the question, hopes that ARVs will increase customer numbers by offering faster and cheaper feeder services. I think this rosy scenario is unlikely. The good news is that rail will continue to have advantages of capacity (mass transit in major conurbations) and speed (long distance intercity). The bad news is that many UK rural and cross country rail routes do not have either advantage. Rail freight also stands to suffer as its main competitor gets rid of much of its labour cost.

A salutary illustration of what might happen can be found in my copy of an edition of the US magazine ‘National Geographic’ from the mid-1950s. It has an article that runs to 30+ pages about the state of US Railroad passenger network and services. It show cases in detail rapidly improving technology (diesel and electric), quality and speed. At the time, the US network was a dense network of frequent passenger routes enjoying its heyday. They carried everyone from the ‘great and the good’ down. Many trains ran in two or three portions, such was the demand. Within two decades of the article, all that remained was the state run and heavily subsidised and much reduced relic of this network – Amtrak – at its low point. Once grand stations in big and medium sized cities were derelict. I can remember boarding a train in the US in a station that had 10 platforms, almost all abandoned bar one for the six trains a week that remained. The network was swept away by the arrival of air travel, which grew in those twenty years from a niche for the really rich, to the point where it was much quicker and cheaper than rail and available to the masses. At least the US Railroads had growing long distance freight to fall back on.

The impact of ARVs on employment in our industry will depend on the speed of take up during the ‘mixed’ phase with both automatically and manually driven cars. Economics suggest a move away from the ‘everyone owns one’ model of cars towards the ride hailing (Uber like) model. Ironically Tesla-like hybrid automatic and manually driven vehicles are a doomed attempt at hanging onto the 'everyone owns one' model.

Today’s cars are so poorly utilised, that all road journeys could be catered for with a small fraction of the total number of vehicles ‘on the road’ today. Today, even at the height of the commuter peak, residential streets are full of parked cars. Take away the high cost of so many vehicles and the cost of a taxi driver and a taxi ride will cost no more than journeys we make in our own cars now and possibly less. Regulators allowing slow speed automatic operation first means that it is a slower speeds in urban areas that ARVs will come to dominate first (very bad news if you are a taxi driver). Railways however are in the unfortunate position of relying on some of the people for whom ARVs are ideal for much of our passenger traffic such as students and young people who can’t afford the insurance, older people who can’t drive or who have lost confidence in driving. ARVs offer this latter group, guaranteed interchange free journeys with any departure time they want, with plenty of space for luggage.

I am a rail enthusiast who has enjoyed working in the rail industry for two decades and hope that it will be able to carry on paying me and providing for my children as long as I need it. My guess is that train drivers could be some of the last workers to actually manually drive - as opposed to simply attending and operate an automatically driven. Sadly, I suspect that sometime as soon as 2030, we will see passenger numbers slump on secondary routes and pressure to convert these into ‘ARV’ only roads...

Sorry to go on a bit - hope it isn't too tedious... :|
 

Billy A

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I would challenge that the public 'already do'. I am often surprised how many people do not know that the DLR or the Tube is automated. On the Tube you see someone sitting up the front. To many, that is the Driver. I wouldn't be surprised that if a poll was carried out if the real numbers came out a lot lower than expected. Even until recently, I didn't know how extensive ATO really is.

I must challenge that many people don't know that trains can be and are automated. I'm not too familiar with the London Underground but I've often been on the Paris Métro where Line 14 has been automated (as in fully automated) since 1998 and Line 1 has been converted since. In each case it's perfectly obvious that the trains are automated - there's no driving cab and you can sit in the front and watch the stations coming towards you out of the dark. It doesn't seem to discourage passengers.
 

Emblematic

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However, automation of their own vehicles could end up being the least of a railway workers worries late next decade. The key threat is from fully Autonomous Road Vehicles (ARVs) that don't require a driver in attendance or anyone else on board.

This is a key point. Other than intensively used commuter routes, rail is going to have to fight to compete. High-speed inter-city will survive on many routes, where it is competitive on cost and time, but other routes will struggle. Freight will continue to be challenged, it's not starting from a position of strength with many flows in decline.

The impact of ARVs on employment in our industry will depend on the speed of take up during the ‘mixed’ phase with both automatically and manually driven cars. Economics suggest a move away from the ‘everyone owns one’ model of cars towards the ride hailing (Uber like) model. Ironically Tesla-like hybrid automatic and manually driven vehicles are a doomed attempt at hanging onto the 'everyone owns one' model.

We are already set up for this change - we've gone from 'everyone owns' to 'most people rent' and far from being your most significant investment after your house, car ownership is now just a modest monthly charge. Where I live there are far more parking bays unused than when I moved in two decades ago. At work, when I started a company car was a normal benefit - now several of my colleagues don't own a car, and a few of the younger ones don't have a license and have no interest in driving.
As to the Tesla model, rather than hanging on to a doomed business model, they are setting themselves up for being a prime supplier of the automated vehicles and systems. The transition will take decades, big cities will have these services fairly soon, but in rural areas people will continue to be self dependent, and will continue to own their own vehicles.
 

Dave1987

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Once again in seeing lots and lots of posts about perfect world on a computer screen models that will not work when that awkward thing called 'the real world' reveals its head above the parapet.......
 

Dave1987

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The public already do accept driverless trains. I never heard of anyone who was scared of going on the DLR. And the ATO Tube lines are basically the same thing but with the "guard" up front in the cab.

Staffless trains may be harder to accept (and personally I would rather keep the staff but have them doing things of more benefit to the passenger i.e. "guard only operation"), but "GOO" (with the "guard" being skilled to drive in emergency like on the DLR, on a degraded, low-speed, on-sight basis) would have many benefits over DOO. Some trains would also benefit from two guards, such as evening services with known trouble.

Do you actually understand how the DLR operates and its limitations compared to the main line?. On the Piccadilly Line or Jubilee Line (I forget which) Roger Ford did a article about how the Drivers/Train Operators whatever you want to call them do plenty of manual driving to keep their practice up. They are far from being simply a "guard up the front".
 

Bromley boy

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Do you actually understand how the DLR operates and its limitations compared to the main line?. On the Piccadilly Line or Jubilee Line (I forget which) Roger Ford did a article about how the Drivers/Train Operators whatever you want to call them do plenty of manual driving to keep their practice up. They are far from being simply a "guard up the front".

Definitely not the Picadilly line. That is 100% manually driven and will remain so until NTFL is introduced.

From a recent thread on this subject drivers on the ATO LU lines (apart from the Victoria line) do regular manual driving to "keep their hand in", and some choose to drive manually the whole time.
 

notverydeep

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Once again in seeing lots and lots of posts about perfect world on a computer screen models that will not work when that awkward thing called 'the real world' reveals its head above the parapet.......

As a railway worker wanting to continue to be so employed, to some extent I hope so. Sadly though, I suspect that in the late 1950s the drivers and fireman of the New York Central Railroad and their colleagues on other railroads across the US would have been similarly sceptical about the initial reliability of diesel locomotives and would have laughed at the travails of the DeHavilland Comet in the early 1960s. But by the mid 1970s the Boeing 707, 727 and similar airliners had put even many of those who had moved to driving diesels out of work, to say nothing of the hundreds of conductors, catering staff and sleeping car attendants...
 

gallafent

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Once again in seeing lots and lots of posts about perfect world on a computer screen models that will not work when that awkward thing called 'the real world' reveals its head above the parapet.......

I think that the people that are currently implementing ATO in production on Thameslink must be well beyond computer screen models at this point! More widely, SNCF published the attached “Introducing the ATO on suburban line Paris” (available directly at http://www.irse.org/knowledge/publi..._suburban_line_IRSE_Conference_october_28.pdf ) in 2014, for example, and also plan to have prototype ATO (or possibly even UTO, from the text in the article, though that seems slightly more far-fetched …) TGVs in 2019, and production in 2023. Even if it slips a bit, that's really not very far in the future.

“France’s national railway operator aims to have autonomous high-speed TGV trains running by 2023, according to a report from FranceInfo. The train operator, known by the French acronym SNCF, will begin testing a prototype of its so-called “drone train” in 2019, FranceInfo reports.”

“The aim, according to the SNCF, is to increase the speed and frequency of TGV journeys, particularly around Paris, where TGV lines intersect with various local and regional rail lines. The operator believes that the automated system would increase the number of trips between Paris and Lyon by 25 percent.” — https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/16/15815666/driverless-tgv-high-speed-trains-france-sncf

Of course, time will tell, … but this technology is very far from being only in the realms of simulation at this point.

Back to Paris again, to get back to the “metro” aspect of this thread, … there is a rolling programme of modernisation running on the metro there which is working on the basis of automation of all lines all the way to UTO, over a timescale of a couple of decades or so, I believe (new lines are already being constructed as UTO).
 

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Billy A

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Once again in seeing lots and lots of posts about perfect world on a computer screen models that will not work when that awkward thing called 'the real world' reveals its head above the parapet.......

Given that RATP managed to have a Metro line automated almost twenty years ago it seems that what works on the screen can indeed be made to work on the rails. Yes, automating a metro line is a much easier challenge than doing the same for the big boys' railway - but twenty years is a long time in automation terms and technology has moved on a great deal since. Doesn't mean that the era of fully automated main line trains is anywhere near of course - I doubt if anybody driving a train now need have much to worry about - but it is getting closer than some seem to think.
What's significant about automation in Paris from the point of view of a rail employee is that the headcount on Line 1 went from 240 to 30 after conversion. How they arrived at this figure I've no idea as ticket sellers alone would come to more than that.
 

Bromley boy

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I think that the people that are currently implementing ATO in production on Thameslink must be well beyond computer screen models at this point! More widely, SNCF published the attached “Introducing the ATO on suburban line Paris” (available directly at http://www.irse.org/knowledge/publi..._suburban_line_IRSE_Conference_october_28.pdf ) in 2014, for example, and also plan to have prototype ATO (or possibly even UTO, from the text in the article, though that seems slightly more far-fetched …) TGVs in 2019, and production in 2023. Even if it slips a bit, that's really not very far in the future.

“France’s national railway operator aims to have autonomous high-speed TGV trains running by 2023, according to a report from FranceInfo. The train operator, known by the French acronym SNCF, will begin testing a prototype of its so-called “drone train” in 2019, FranceInfo reports.”

“The aim, according to the SNCF, is to increase the speed and frequency of TGV journeys, particularly around Paris, where TGV lines intersect with various local and regional rail lines. The operator believes that the automated system would increase the number of trips between Paris and Lyon by 25 percent.” — https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/16/15815666/driverless-tgv-high-speed-trains-france-sncf

Of course, time will tell, … but this technology is very far from being only in the realms of simulation at this point.

This is a lot of truth in the above post.

However, being objective about it and looking at the facts (rather than a rose tinted "Luddite" view of drivers' likely longevity!) the UK rail modernisation plans over the next 20-30 years are largely a known quantity and do not include any move to driverless operation. The main question during that time will be how quickly we move from the current visually driven trains to incab signalling with ATO overlay.

Even on the tube, current thinking is it may move to driverless on the deep level lines within the next 10-15 years as NTFL comes in. And even that seems to be far from certain.

The French TGV network is leaps and bounds ahead of the UK - and already had full incab signalling on the LGV lines. It's probably more similar to how HS2 will be, when it eventually opens, than anything else in the UK (although even HS2 will require manual driving for operation on the classic lines, at least until the signalling is upgraded).

As I mentioned before, my personal view as a relatively young mainline driver is that I reckon the job will be around in some form for as long as I wish to do it - my main concern is whether it will become incredibly monotonous with increasing automation.

At this point getting fed up and jacking it in or getting sacked for incidents are both higher on my "worry" list than automation for reasons I may end up leaving the grade!
 
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LETHLFH

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The investment to make all of this nationwide must be someway off, most routes I will sign are absoloute block at least in part and some nearby routes and single line worked by token. If they can't give us TCB and colour light signals I can't see them investing in automation anytime soon.
 

NotATrainspott

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I am a rail enthusiast who has enjoyed working in the rail industry for two decades and hope that it will be able to carry on paying me and providing for my children as long as I need it. My guess is that train drivers could be some of the last workers to actually manually drive - as opposed to simply attending and operate an automatically driven. Sadly, I suspect that sometime as soon as 2030, we will see passenger numbers slump on secondary routes and pressure to convert these into ‘ARV’ only roads...

Sorry to go on a bit - hope it isn't too tedious... :|

I don't think it'll happen that way. Remember that the growth the railway has seen since the nadir in the 80s has been down to a focus on things that private motoring can't do so well. Autonomous vehicles won't be able to get people from King's Lynn into King's Cross every day in anything like the same amount of time for the same sort of cost. They're also never going to be able to compete with trains on long distance high speed travel. The real killer of long distance trains in the US was the jet airliner, not the car.
 

158756

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I don't think it'll happen that way. Remember that the growth the railway has seen since the nadir in the 80s has been down to a focus on things that private motoring can't do so well. Autonomous vehicles won't be able to get people from King's Lynn into King's Cross every day in anything like the same amount of time for the same sort of cost. They're also never going to be able to compete with trains on long distance high speed travel. The real killer of long distance trains in the US was the jet airliner, not the car.

The railways will likely survive when they do things railways are good at - high volumes and long distances. Basically most of Network South East and the better bits of Intercity. The rest, including the entirety of what was Regional Railways, may face a very bleak future.
 

NotATrainspott

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The railways will likely survive when they do things railways are good at - high volumes and long distances. Basically most of Network South East and the better bits of Intercity. The rest, including the entirety of what was Regional Railways, may face a very bleak future.

Why though? Regional railways had its nadir too and its comeback is driven by very similar reasons. Regional train services have got faster and more frequent and connect smaller towns to larger urban areas which have services which can't be sustained in smaller urban areas. People in Hebden Bridge are still going to want to go into Manchester and Leeds city centres for the shops, and making vehicles autonomous isn't going to magically make them better at getting people there than the train. There really aren't many passenger rail lines left that don't ultimately fit a pattern of taking people on journeys which are somewhat difficult to do by car.
 

bramling

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The public already do accept driverless trains. I never heard of anyone who was scared of going on the DLR. And the ATO Tube lines are basically the same thing but with the "guard" up front in the cab.

Staffless trains may be harder to accept (and personally I would rather keep the staff but have them doing things of more benefit to the passenger i.e. "guard only operation"), but "GOO" (with the "guard" being skilled to drive in emergency like on the DLR, on a degraded, low-speed, on-sight basis) would have many benefits over DOO. Some trains would also benefit from two guards, such as evening services with known trouble.

The ATO LU drivers are certainly more than a guard, and the DLR's PSAs likewise. When there is an issue with the signalling, which is an everyday occurrence, they are still responsible for moving the train in compliance with the rule book. That is very much more than a guard's role, and with a price tag to match.

I just can't see the point of having a roving member of staff on LU. Like the DLR they would simply have to spend a lot of time up front simply to be able to safely access controls when needed. The moment you have safety critical processes involved it's simply better to have the person in a cab - for a number of very good reasons. DLR is not ideal by any means - it works but I don't feel entirely comfortable with the PSA carrying out safety-critical procedures surrounded by potentially intrusive passengers. If you've ever been in the heart of a major failure on the DLR and seen the PSA in action or heard the radio comms to/from the control room you may have seen things in a different - and at times frankly less than satisfactory - light.
 
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notverydeep

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I don't think it'll happen that way. Remember that the growth the railway has seen since the nadir in the 80s has been down to a focus on things that private motoring can't do so well. Autonomous vehicles won't be able to get people from King's Lynn into King's Cross every day in anything like the same amount of time for the same sort of cost. They're also never going to be able to compete with trains on long distance high speed travel. The real killer of long distance trains in the US was the jet airliner, not the car.

In many ways King’s Lynn is a good illustration of how railways may be more vulnerable than many in the industry think. Passengers using King’s Lynn will be travelling to a wide variety of destinations and it is by no means clear that London will dominate passenger numbers. A good number of commuters will surely be heading for Cambridge, but equally other travellers will be heading for more local destinations such as Ely or much further afield, university in Sheffield perhaps, a visit to relatives in York or a weekend hiking in the Peak District or any one of a myriad of other destinations or journey purposes.

Take someone living in Mill Lane King’s Lynn – a location I’ve selected at random from a map to be within the town, but neither right on the edge or right at the station. To get to Sheffield University (fairly close to the station), York or Derby will involve at least one interchange and associated waiting time. The road distance using the A17 would be shorter. Bing Maps confirms this, estimating two hours and thirty minutes to Sheffield University by car for the 110 mile journey, but I would have to get to the station first, so at least four hours by train and bus (again the times are from the multi modal Journey Planner accessed from Bing Maps). And an Autonomous Road Vehicle can go whenever I’m ready, rather than say once an hour. Don’t forget that most people doing this sort of journey drive already, the train is picking up those who can’t, can’t afford to or don’t want to.

Even the commute to Cambridge isn’t as certain for the train as one might imagine. If the destination is close to Cambridge or Cambridge North stations, then yes, but if it were at Addenbrooke’s Hospital or the industrial / science park areas around the south of the City, the car beats the combined Train / Bus by 15 minutes even with some congestion noted on my ‘Bing Maps’ search. If I had to drive, I wouldn’t want to do such a long car journey every day (though many do), but as a passenger in a taxi like ARV perhaps more would be inclined to choose the ARV over the train and bus? If the rail route were to lose even half of its traffic in this way, would it remain viable?

I don’t know what the top destinations from King’s Lynn are and what numbers go to each, so it is hard to judge. I doubt that the route to King’s Lynn is the most vulnerable UK rail route in a world where road traffic is mainly ARVs, but I wouldn’t place it firmly in the High Speed Intercity or Mass Transit categories that I would expect to survive in such a world. This world is clearly not going to arrive overnight, but I wouldn’t bet against 2035 looking a bit like this. The decline of US passenger rail was an illustration that changing technology (as you say the Jet Airliner in that case) can change everything for a transport mode over as little as 20 years. I would suggest that this sort of scenario will be more in the minds of a ROSCO investing in new rolling stock, or a DfT Civil Servant looking at an rail infrastructure upgrade scheme in the next Control Period than it was in the last. Anyone just starting a career on the railway should give it at least a little thought.

As a (mid career?) railwayman, I hope I'll get to retired before it arrives... :|
 
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trash80

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"And an Autonomous Road Vehicle can go whenever I’m ready, rather than say once an hour."

Well perhaps, we don't know how it will all work yet. There will be a finite number of these vehicles so it may not be quite as convenient as some people think.
 

Chris M

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"And an Autonomous Road Vehicle can go whenever I’m ready, rather than say once an hour."

Well perhaps, we don't know how it will all work yet. There will be a finite number of these vehicles so it may not be quite as convenient as some people think.

And even if they become available tomorrow, it's going to be several years before they are sufficiently common you will see one most days in a medium-sized city.
Then several more years after that until you can expect to find several in every supermarket car park.
Add on a few more years until they are the majority of vehicles on the road, only around now will all but the most affluent of students have one of their own.
It will be more years after that before seeing a manually driven car starts to become rare.
Then another few years after that before seeing one outside of a specialist gathering or similar becomes almost unheard of.

That's assuming there are no regulatory changes that make the pattern of technological development in cars significantly different to other recent technological developments, and retrofitting automated driving capabilities to cars not built with it is not very significantly cheaper (short and long term) than buying a new car - which it certainly will not be for several years after their introduction.

In 2014 the average age of cars on the road in the UK was 7.8 years and that average age was rising. Buses and light commercial vehicles had a "slightly higher" average age (same source) but I've not looked for the exact figure.
 

notverydeep

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9 Feb 2014
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And even if they become available tomorrow, it's going to be several years before they are sufficiently common you will see one most days in a medium-sized city.
Then several more years after that until you can expect to find several in every supermarket car park.
Add on a few more years until they are the majority of vehicles on the road, only around now will all but the most affluent of students have one of their own.
It will be more years after that before seeing a manually driven car starts to become rare.
Then another few years after that before seeing one outside of a specialist gathering or similar becomes almost unheard of.

That's assuming there are no regulatory changes that make the pattern of technological development in cars significantly different to other recent technological developments, and retrofitting automated driving capabilities to cars not built with it is not very significantly cheaper (short and long term) than buying a new car - which it certainly will not be for several years after their introduction.

I agree the first few years will see slow up take, but I think it will not be to long before the growth becomes very rapid.

Cars are used incredibly inefficiently. Most of the time most, no almost all of them are sat parked and going nowhere. If you want to test this yourself, count 50 cars from your door at say 3 am, when the highest number of people are at home and then do the same at 8:45. The distance you have to walk will be a little bit further than in the middle of the night, but not much. This means that a huge amount of capital and resources are tied up doing nothing. The ‘ride hailing’ model allows vehicles to be pooled and used efficiently compared to the individually owned model, spreading the cost of the capital over many users.

At the railway company where I work, just fewer than 9% of all trips on weekdays are in progress at the busiest time of day – between 08:30 and 08:45 – and commuters are a high proportion of our passengers. Applying this figure to the UK vehicle fleet of 35 million or so cars mean that a maximum of about 3.2 million cars would be in use at any one time. This is less than a year’s worth of new UK vehicle registrations, so ARVs could become comprehensive in a relatively few years.

Take the King’s Lynn example again. The town has a population of 42,800 of whom 83.4% are likely to be over 15 (assuming the relevant Wikipedia articles are correct). If they are typical of the UK population they will have 2 cars per 3 adults, around 23,800 cars across the town. But of these only 2070 are in use at the busiest time. Even a village of 250 adults would still have 167 cars, but only 23 in use at the busiest times!

If this makes it seem possible to achieve comprehensive coverage of ARVs fairly rapidly, for the railways it could be even worse though. The early adopters of ARVs (once they can operate unattended) are likely to include many of those who don’t have a car, plus who cannot or prefer not to drive. Aside from commuters and fast intercity passengers, these are the railways best customers and are a very substantial part of the rural and cross country rail market. Providing enough ARVs for these early groups would take even less time than providing them for the whole population of car owners.

For me the key question is how long will it take for the technology to reach the point where unattended operation is considered allowable by regulators in the US? I can’t know the answer, but suspect it isn’t that far away. Once this step is reached and the technology starts to have significant numbers of daily users, the benefits will become much more apparent to the wider population causing adoption to speed up. Once this happens, regulators elsewhere will be under pressure to follow the US lead.
 
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