Robotrains take over NY's Brooklyn-Manhattan line under careful watch of human conductor overlords
By Tim Stevens 
posted February 24th 2009 8:26AM
posted February 24th 2009 8:26AM
[Thanks, Zoli]
posted February 24th 2009 8:26AM
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It's raining robots!
HELP US!
This is exactly the same as the London DLR. I'm sure the DLR wasn't the first either.
I, for one, welcome our new human overlords.
Wait, what just happened ?..
damn ▀█▀ █ ▀█▀ ▄█▀, nice Unicode.
-jp
hehe...metbags
As far as I know, this is the only line in NYC that is wired up with the precise train tracking system. We won't see it on any other line for a long time.
Sir...we've lost contact with the L-train...
The techs over at Skynet say its gained sentience and its on ITS OWN TRACK NOW.
-God Help us
I think its way more secure a train running under the control of Skynet than a monorail drive by Homer.
Skynet is currently in Beta. Fully functional Skynet launch, 2012
Two words: About time.
Five more: I can't wait for more.
It begins soon the entire world will be like Burnout Paradise there are cars everywhere, but no people. Just autonomous vehicles driving around and the only human left is a bad radio DJ. Its like that Stephen King movie Maximum Overdrive.
rofl, so true
I'm sorry but Maximum Overdrive rocked - "The video game says play me"
Hey I never said it was a bad movie. I said Automika, ca? was a bad DJ.
I can't imagine this working until more civility is introduced to NYC - especially the rough crowd of the L line.
People always hold the doors - how will our new robot overlords deal with this?
ED-209 will be patrolling stations.
I read this as "Robostains".
Automate the whole system and fire all the MTA employees. New Yorkers remember your Christmas time transit strike a few years ago.
Sounds like a good idea to me. They could also run them 24 hours a day. There are many airports (I've been to Dallas & Detroit) that have computer driven trams to get people around. They work just fine without a human driving.
Pretty soon most people's jobs could be taken over by a machine.
And then we can get rid of all that human error by getting rid of all humans. Progress!!
That friggin sucked......... I work a block or so away from the Coney Island yard and when that happened I had to walk home passed these panzies........ I threw stale xmas cookies at them........
Fascism and Communism couldn't make the trains run on time.
Perhaps Skynet can do better.
As long as RIM doesn't get the contract to write the Skynet OS. Else, Skynet will require a battery pull every few hours, randomly restart, and need to be reassuringly touched and pressed, twice, to do anything.
As for productivity, well, the "L-trains" will probably shirk most of the day to log onto CrackNet.com to get wind of the latest leaked beta Skynet OS, each one with failed promises to take over the world.
:)
Trains in Japan run on time pretty regularly - down to the second. (15 seconds late is considered late.) And most are run by humans.
The London DLR already has this system in place, right?
Yes, and to limited extent so do the Central and Jubilee lines.
The Victoria line's had this since the 1960s when it was built. Ofc, being so old, it doesn't quite work on occasions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNqKnfT52tw
Many newer metro systems such as the BART, Hong Kong's MTR and New Delhi's Metro also have (almost) fully automated systems, with a driver on-board in case something goes wrong.
@Aaron
really? that explains...well nothing really...but thanks for the info!
and as for the article...+1 for the most appropriate use for "meatbags"!
Vancouver's Skytrain system has been entirely automated since launch (in 1986), with no derailments or collisions ever. The only incidents have been mechanical failures and, as is inevitable with rail systems, suicides.
They don't have any kind of attendants, there's no driver car (though when it's snowing or something they send a staff member onto each train, I think just to reassure people, there's nothing they could actually do there). There's a big window up the front of each carriage with a front-facing seat. You get quite a lot of kids there, 'driving the train'. It's cute.
On Vancouver's Skytrain, the front of the train has a cabinet that an operator can open up and drive the trains manually, they've got a joystick and a couple of buttons.. You may see this on very rare occasions. They can even turn on the wipers.
I wonder whether the robot is trained to ignore people lying on the tracks, just like one of their drivers did recently?
Watch for conductors unions demanding more money for their new hi-tech overseeing duties.
Finally the MTA workers are getting replaced just like the omen in my alpha-bits said. Hopefully this will eventually spread to the other subways and the metronorth too. Although I'm not so sure the robotrains will be too keen on reopening the doors when someone gets caught as they're closing. . . then again the human conductors don't really care much either.
Full automation of subways lines occurs decades ago in Japan and in many other countries.
Have you never been in a NY subway? this is the highest tech we've had since the development of automatically closing doors. I just wish they'd schedule one station at a time for massive cleaning and maybe reconstruction. . . and deodorizing (I'm looking at you Union Square)
I remember when the LED displays on the outside of the trains where new...hitech shit.
Unions and innovation don't get along well.
I don't know of any Tokyo subway lines that are fully automated. The only line in Tokyo that's automated is the Yurikamome line to Odaiba, and that's not part of the subway.
Tokyo subway trains may have positive train control (where the train can be controlled remotely), but that's an override in the case of driver incapacitation or something - and anyway, that's still human control. They don't use CBTC like the L train in NYC does.
Washington's subway system is completely CBTC-based.
Meteor Tube in Paris has no driver since 1999 - Ligne 14 St Lazare to Olympiades - this "Tube" is driven by a clever computer in ADA langage with a high redundancy on security issues. Today 10 years later, there has been zero accident of course. The system has been tuned to a very high frequency of trains sometimes lower than 2 minutes between each.... its amazing there seems to be allways a train waiting you or arriving for you. It is probable that at such a high frequency the human factor ( the metro conductor) is the weak one.
It has been consistantly the most reliable métro for me to count on.
Oh and its funny to see the face of people ---- Yes I'm confident in the hardware and softwre and YES I like to be bullet driven by a line of code to my destination.
Enjoy your human controllers New York!
Here in HK our subway has been running by computer system since establishment (aka 1979)
The operator only open and close the train door and that's it.
Our maxinum frequency, if my memory is correct, is one train per 100 seconds
This technology wasn't even a glint in an engineer's eye in 1979. I can assure you the HK subway system has not been automated since then.
In fact, this article says specifically (as other similar articles also do) that the first fully automated train in Hong Kong is running on the line to Disneyland: http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/hong_kong/
And that line didn't open until 1998. That doesn't mean it was automated in 1998 either, though.
At 8am the trains were skipping stops and packed as usual. It actually seemed less functional then usual. I didn't think that was possible.
I rode the L this morning and saw the conductor sitting there with his arms crossed. He could have been napping. Not sure though.
L-Train.....ONLINE.
Just keep increasing the force to close them. After the first few hands are left on the platform side of the door, people will learn.
Don't give the hipsters any more reasons to move to Williamsburg!!!
it's more machine than man now; twisted and evil...
Love the L train, its pretty fast...Not sure Robots could make much of a difference
Boston's red line and orange line are like this already. They basically just need conductors to make sure nobody's going to get stuck in a door, close the doors, and the train goes to the next stop. I guess it causes the steel wheels to go flat though due to the braking being all or nothing.
This is a great idea and I hope it spreads to all other lines as soon as feasible. So many times you stand on a platform for 15-20 mins waiting for a train. Finally one shows, you get on, it moves a few hundred yards, then stops or creeps along. The conductor comes on and says there is a delay due to "traffic ahead." Thing is, you KNOW this cannot possibly be true on many platforms because a train hasn't passed in 15-20 minutes, and it is impossible for another train to have merged in front of you (example, local between 116th and 110th on 1 line). You KNOW the delay is because some lazy controller is not paying attention, and the conductor can't go past a red light - so you sit and wait until the lazy controller gets back on the job and allows the train to progress.
Also, the newer robocars with automated voices are nice because, shocker, you can actually hear the announcements, unlike the lazy MTA folk who garble into the PA system and you can maybe understand 10% of the announcements. I say replace ALL MTA folk with robocars and computer systems - the whole lot of MTA employees need to be downsized then maybe they will start to give a crap about doing even a mediocre job.
This is not the way the system works. The signaling system is automated and always has been - it works on a block system. If a train is occupying the block ahead, the light is red. If a switch is thrown in the block ahead, the light is red. (The switches are automated too.) No human interaction is involved.
It is possible for a train operator himself to be driving too slow and hold up trains behind, and then as passengers build up waiting on stations due to the longer waits, you get a cascading effect as trains then end up stuck in stations as passengers board. And the delays increase. So that can be due to human factors in driving the train, and it doesn't take much. But the signals have never been controlled by humans. (The "hold lights" at stations are a different thing; they're not part of the signaling system, they're the lights right next to the conductor position and they are human controlled.)
You don't know how the blocks are defined, so when you say it's "impossible" that there's a train holding you up, that may not be true. For example, I think it's on the Manhattan bridge (either it or the Williamsburg) that only one train can run at a time, even though there's clearly capacity for more. It's for maintenance reasons. The bridge is a block. If one train's at one end of the bridge, a train all the way at the other end still has to wait. This is not true of other bridges.
By the way, the reason the CBTC trains can have shorter headways is that they do away with the block system. I'm not sure exactly how CBTC maintains headways but I believe it is constantly calculating both distance and time between trains to maintain even spacing and safety. So there should be fewer starts and stops in tunnels too, because you shouldn't need to be waiting for a train to completely clear the next block ahead before you can proceed. (And that happens all the time on other lines, because the blocks are not all the same length and don't all have the same speed limit.)