Why driverless trains aren't the magical answer to TfL's problems
Or 'Why Young Conservatives shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the Tube'.
Say hello to Issac Farnbank.
Isaac is Chairman of the Isle of Wight Young Conservatives and he has some opinions about London’s transport network:
To save you clicking through to Isaac’s ‘thoughts’ we’re going to summarise his argument for “getting on board” with the idea of driverless tube trains. But, just in case Isaac’s points aren’t as robust as he thinks they are, we’ve also drafted in transport journalist and historian ‘John Bull’ (of London Reconnections) to fact check.
N.B. The first thing to know about Isaac is that he has absolutely no qualms about comparing London’s transport unions to “Putin’s Russia”. You see, in Isaac’s eyes, just as Putin “blackmails surrounding states with its monopoly over gas supplies,” so unions like the RMT “hold Londoner’s [sic] ransom”. That’s the baseline we’re starting from. We just thought we should warn you.
Introducing driverless trains would not only stop strikes, it would save tens of millions of pounds
Issac’s logic: “If [drivers] were to become surplus to operational requirements, total savings would exceed £81.75 million. Quite an inroad into TfL’s current debt of £11.6 billion. Compare and contrast that with the cost of strikes, estimated at £100 million….Far from being “unaffordable”… driverless trains will allow for unprecedented, momentous efficiencies to be introduced to London’s tube network, opening the door to more cost-effective fares and future inward investment.”
John’s response: Everyone who makes this argument tries to pretend that it’s about service improvement, or customers, or anything else. But it never is. There’s no justification for driverless trains in London under any of those arguments. What it always comes down to is strike busting.
Unfortunately the ‘fag packet’ maths he has here do not add up. We’ve got six or seven Tube lines depending on how you break it down. So £80 million ‘savings’ is roughly 10 to 12 million pounds saving per line. If you want to have fully automatic, unattended trains then you need exit routes for passengers in the tunnels. The Central line is tiny, it's why it’s so hot. So, first you’ve got to rebore the entire Central line. Then you’ve got to do the same for the Victoria line and again for the Jubilee line.
If we take Crossrail’s cost of £20 billion and assume the tunnelling bit was around £8 billion of that, then we’ve already spent £8 billion just for the Central line! So we'‘e going to do that for £20 million saving a year, tops? I don’t know what 8 billion divided by 20 years is, but I reckon you’re probably looking at about 400 years before you see the value back in that, versus having the odd strike day every year. And that’s ignoring the economic impact on London of closing an entire tube line for seven years while you rebore it.
It’s one of those ideas that sounds amazing when you sit there and work it all out. But actually, when you turn around and look at the value in it, you have to question why you would do it and why you wouldn’t you just invest that money into other things.
All Tube drivers do is push two buttons
Issac’s argument: “The most work Tube drivers do in a typical shift is push two buttons at each station, one to open/close doors and another to engage ‘auto-start’, the activation of the automatic driving system. Apart from the odd shunt to and from depots, and the walk from one end to the other, not much more is involved so long as no issues are encountered. ‘Driver’ is really a misnomer.”
John’s response: There’s two things everyone seems to forget. The first is that TfL hates the unions with a passion. If there was any way on earth they could get rid of the unions and do something to reduce their power, then they would have done it ten years ago. The second thing is what we call ‘crayoning’. The people who like to draw lines on maps with crayons to make their argument work because they have to reduce the network to a level of simplicity that’s not true in reality. When people say things like “Well, you could just get rid of drivers, they don’t do much,” they forget that there’s whole vast sections of the tube that overlap with National Rail. What do you do on those sections of line? On the Metropolitan line, the District line, the Bakerloo line? Do you suddenly close all those sections and say “You don’t get to come on the Tube anymore because we want to stop strikes?”
But they did it in Paris!
Issac’s logic: “We only have to look to the fully automated system in Paris, where there have been fewer accidents, a more reliable service, and no major operational issues since grade 4 automation was implemented in 2013. The facts speak for themselves. They speak with greater authority than some of the most obstructionist unions in history.”
John’s response: People always point to some of the old lines in Paris or Madrid and say “Look, they did it there!”. But there’s something like 120 Metro systems in the world that were built before 1980, and of all of those there’s only four that anyone has ever been able to retroactively bring up to level four (i.e. fully unattended and fully automatic). Maybe that’s a clue to the fact that this is actually quite hard! And don’t forget, London is quirky. We’re the first network. So will future Tube lines be automated to at least level four or above? Yes, absolutely. Crossrail is that automated in the central section. But the reason you will still have drivers on Crossrail trains is because the trains need to go outside the central section back onto the same railway that the Tube is on.
But the DLR doesn’t have drivers
Issac’s logic: “The Government has not flinched in its determination to push for Automation Level 3 (essentially what the DLR has, automated trains with a “Train Captain”), and that is to be saluted.”
John’s response: What the DLR proved is that you can do attended operation. Does that reduce some strike action? Yes, a bit. Because it’s easier to train a bunch of managers to cover in an emergency when their job is being a Train Captain and not driving a train. Does it bring wages down slightly? Yeah, probably. Does it remove the human being entirely? No. And the main reason for that is platform edge doors. What the DLR shows is that the moment you hit serious passenger numbers on a semi-automated system that only has Train Captains, then you have to introduce full height platform edge doors or you risk passenger incidents and accidents, which have happened on the DLR.
You can’t retrofit those kinds of doors on most of the network. What do you do at Turnham Green, where you’ve got District line trains and Piccadilly line trains that have doors in different positions? Where does the platform edge door go? How do you put them in the Central line tunnels when there’s no ventilation access? The Central line is a tunnel with what is essentially a big plug running through it every time a train goes through. You can feel the air on the platforms. Imagine what happens if you put platform edge doors in there! Crossrail has entire ventilation systems to allow it to have platform edge doors without creating tornado effects on platform.
Technology! The future! Progress!
Issac’s logic: “In the same spirit, we should not shy away from bold, innovative progress. High time for us to not only drag TfL, probably kicking and screaming, into the 21st Century, but to be at the outmost promethean frontier of inventive development.”
John’s response: Is it an absolutely valid argument for new build? Yes. And London should never ever ever build a Tube line again that isn’t at least automated to level three, i.e. DLR level Train Captains with all the infrastructure to support them.
Can you retro-engineer any of the existing lines for anything other than insane cost? Well, maybe the Waterloo & City. Congratulations! You’ve got no more strikes on the Waterloo & City line.
You can find London Reconnections on Twitter here, and John on Twitter here (we highly recommend his thread on the history of Bradley’s Spanish Bar).
We have no idea where you’d find Isaac, or why you’d want to.
News bits
Huge congratulation to Reclaim These Streets, who won their case against the Met last week. The judge agreed that their right to protest and their freedom of speech has been breeched when social-distancing rules were used as an excuse stop their planned vigil for Sarah Everard. There’s a statement from the group on their Crowd Justice page, and you can read our interview with RTS founder Jamie Klingler here.
On Friday a washing machine full of fake bank notes, surrounded by union jack flags turned up on a street in Kensington. The stunt was staged by a group called Kensington Against Dirty Money, which has been formed to “highlight the need to combat corruption” in the borough where there are “6,000 anonymous foreign-owned properties”.
Somehow, Jonathan Pie (aka Tom Walker) has got himself a regular gig at the New York Times. His latest offering is a typically shouty and unfunny rant about the UK’s lacklustre sanctioning of oligarchs. This is the same Tom Walker who, up until 2016, was very happy to license his content to the state-owned television channel, Russia Today.
London is “significantly better prepared to deal with a potential terror attack” than it was five years ago according to a new independent review. That’s really the only good news though. The rest (including an increased threat from extreme right-wing terrorists, the rise in the number of ‘incels’, disinformation on social medial, and police cuts) makes for less cheery reading.
Myanmar’s former ambassador is being ‘urged’ to get out of London by the government. Kyaw Zwar Minn was chucked out of his own embassy last April after calling for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, but he’s still living in his Hampstead mansion and says his life is in danger if he goes back to Myanmar. Despite being outwardly supportive of Minn’s “brave stand in support of democracy” the UK government has “repeatedly urged him to leave the house, saying his presence there poses legal problems for Britain and risks to its staff in Myanmar.”
Returning to the Tube for a second… A couple of weeks ago Science Focus asked the question Does the air pollution on the London Underground harm your health? Unfortunately the answer seems to be, ‘we’re not really sure yet’. The article does mention though that deeper lines, like the Northern line, are worse for pollution “compared to higher level lines like the Circle, District, Hammersmith & City, and Metropolitan lines.”
The company behind Printworks and The Drumsheds are opening a new ‘open-air club’ on 400,000 sq ft of land in Silvertown Quays. It’s going to be called Dockyards and could open before the end of the year.
Burger King’s first completely vegan restaurant opens today in Leicester Square. It’s a pilot, so it will only be open for a month, but for the next few weeks you’ll be able to sample new products like the Bakon Double Cheeeze XL and Vegan Nugget Burger.
Yayoi Kusama's infinity rooms exhibition at Tate Modern (currently sold out until the end of this month) has been extended for a full year, so will now run until June 2023.
The British Book Awards get handed out later this year, and as part of it they’ll be announcing the Independent Bookshop of the Year. Shortlisted in the London category are Islington’s BookBar, Burley Fisher Books in Haggerston, Crouch End children’s bookshop Pickled Pepper Books, the Childrens Bookshop in Muswell Hill and Village Books in Dulwich.
Last week, Keith Mcnally (the American restaurateur and incorrigible shit-stirrer) wrote on Instagram that “it's an open secret that many of London's restaurant critics are open to corruption” citing Fay Maschler as one of those ‘corruptables’. Cue enraged replies from people like Oisín Rogers of the Guinea Grill pub, Will Beckett of Hawksmoor and…erm, G*les C*ren.
The reason why Fairnbank compares RMT to Putin's Russia because its tank assistant general secretary Eddie Dempsey is a big supporter of the Russian-sponsored separatists in the Donbass (old stalinist reflexes of fealty to Russia die hard, it seems):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/03/01/enemy-underground-putin-apologists-brought-london-standstill/
Now, to be sure, even a driverless Tube can be shut down if the support personnel who keep it running also go on strike, so it's not the silver bullet he thinks.