This week has seen the Mayor once again pushing one of his big ideas for re-election: driverless Tubes, bringing with them not just a more high-tech underground but an almighty confrontation with the Tube unions. In the midst of endless wrangles with the unions over Olympic bonuses, Boris Johnson might imagine that’s a popular gesture with voters. Yet he is both dead right and completely wrong about “driverless” trains.
Driverless is a misnomer. Such trains would be operated by a central computer, overseen by human controllers. There are already dozens of metro systems around the world which use such trains. In Copenhagen, for example, the computer controls everything centrally from the running of the trains to the opening of the doors, with just a handful of operators in the control centre – but nevertheless, with stewards on every train.
In London we already have two versions of “driverless” trains. On the Victoria, Jubilee and Central Lines, under the Automatic Train Operation system (ATO), the driver operates only the doors at stations – and can also drive the train or stop it in an emergency.
Meanwhile on the Docklands Light Railway, there is no “driver” but a “train captain” able to take over the operation if there is a problem. The DLR can work like that because it operates at lower speed than the Underground, and its one major tunnel section has a walkway alongside for easy evacuation.
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