… because they should be replaced by driverless trains sooner rather than later.
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London Tube drivers should not have to work unsocial hours at all…July 8th, 2015 |
 35 comments to London Tube drivers should not have to work unsocial hours at all… |
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If it works for the DLR then it would work for the Tube.
That was my thought actually. If uber is planning half a million driverless cars by 2020 why the hell would the tube have drivers.
They’re like the manure collectors on New York’s streets circa one year before the introduction of the Model T.
President Reagan had a fairly good “counter offer” for the gub’mint sector Union “collective” folks of the Air Traffic Controllers, “bargaining” by proxy, when they decided to not do their jobs.
I’ve heard your plight. You’re FIRED.
But..but…
FIRED! “Collectively”!
Suddenly, “management” had to demonstrate THEY were “up to the job”.
Suddenly, competence, efficiency, and “vetting” of the replacements skyrocketed.
Chip
“They’re like the manure collectors on New York’s streets circa one year before the introduction of the Model T.”
Or weavers JUST before the power loom became the obvious choice for clothing the poor.
Or printers, Just before high speed presses brought “affordable access” to “education of the masses”?
Those NYC street sweepers were replaced by mechanized beasts that ALSO fill city coffers with fine on automobiles that “don’t park in the correct place at the correct time”.
There’s a whole social “cooperative” ballet involving double parking, alternate side of the street tango. Quite impressive to watch, astounding in it’s (relatively) savvy organic orchestration.
I understand why you point out that as progress is made some jobs become redundant.
That should mean that those job-holders can move into other areas of work that will be better for the economy and for the job-holders.
Fair enough.
What I don’t understand, and certainly don’t like, is your implied pleasure at the discomfort of Tube drivers.
I ask you, and would like you to ask yourself: how much of your analysis is the positive welcoming of progress and how much is malice?
If none of it is malice then I think you need to think carefully about the tone and implications of your writing.
Then let me enlighten you. If you sense hostility in my words, you are quite correct, and it is not by accident. I will be gravely inconvenienced by this strike (indeed that is the whole point) and thus will be delighted to see the strikers eventually inconvenienced themselves by being made redundant by technology. Plus my encounters over the years with LU employees has lead me to give not a single fuck about their woes, given that tends to be their attitude towards their customers by and large. So yes, malice, I has it 👿
For myself it isn’t malice, but rather the simple fact that a single militant union leader like the late Bob Crow shouldn’t be able to bring a city like London to its knees for trivial reasons.
During his reign and supported by Ken Livingstone as mayor (although BoJo wasn’t much better) the RMT’s frequent strikes made the lives of those living and working in London (self included at the time) a living hell.
So yes, I do think that the tubes should be automated, not only to provide 24-hour service, but to stop the RMT being able to blackmail the residents and workers of London.
It’s not that I want to create more unemployment, I just want the transport system to run effectively and efficiently 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 52 weeks a year.
Dream on. An enormous amount of money would have to be spent upgrading the tube so that it could be automated. It’ll never happen.
JG,the Western Welfare States are the worst of both worlds. Capitalists would sack them, Fascists would shoot them.
Your joking surely? The tube driver is little more than an extra passenger these days, there on the basis of spurious “safety” claims by the RMT.
The new stock can be automated with relative ease if it were allowed.
You are entirely mistaken. They are already on the cards, I just wish we could get them sooner.
The problem is, as I understand it, that all the lines cross at some point. The DLR doesn’t have that problem. Besides, the system is huge. You would have to go a line at a time, giving plenty of opportunity for sabotage from the workers on the other lines. Automate the Piccadilly, for example, and I expect the District staff would find a way to stuff it up.
Perry, I’d love to be proved wrong, but as they never got the “time to next train” system working properly on my old line, the Piccadilly, I have trouble believing it.
Also, how many years have they been talking about 24 hour running? Seems like my entire working life, and finally it’s due to start on my 64th birthday. I won’t live to see an automated tube.
It’s been a long time since lorry drivers went on strike, oh, wait, they are private and face competition…
The costs in Britain of doing anything ‘public sector/statutory carriers’ are so absurd, like ‘upgrading motorways’ rail electrification etc. that automating the London Underground would probably finish it off.
Start again with trains replaced by fast-moving conveyor belts that you join/leave on pods on a helter/skelter ride instead of the escalator, and you get shoved off the conveyor at your ‘stop’ and slide to a halt by going uphill out of the station. Not sure that this would suit everyone but it could be fun. Also it eliminates the need to change, your pod could be slotted into the right tunnel at the right spot.
After the cossetted confines of their working conditions and general fuck you attitude to the public they are supposed to serve, they are not employable anywhere in the economy except maybe the NHS. Be kinder to shoot them.
Pretty much what Roue le Jour said. The London Underground is a system of tube lines that use a mixture of technologies dating from the 1850s to the present. In order for a line to go driverless, everything must be upgraded – the train, the signalling, the control room, and a number of other things. There are also an assortment of different safety requirements when there is no driver that systems must be adjusted for. This must al be done for the entire line. If the line is connected to another line with which it has overlapping services (most of them are) then you potentially have a mixture of services with and without drivers on the same line, which is asking for trouble. If you are building an all new line from scratch that is not connected to anything else, then driverless is a no-brainer, as with the DLR and with Metro Line 14 in Paris. However, for something like the London Underground, it is a huge job.
Plans for replacement of rolling stock, signalling etc take place over timescales of decades. It is present TfL policy that when these upgrades occur, provision is being made for future driverless operations. (So, for instance, when new trains are ordered, they are “driverless trains”, even though they will probably have drivers for their first decade or two of operation. This leads to lots of headlines about “new driverless trains” from people who do not understand the situation). When every aspect of a line is finally upgraded in accordance with the multiple decades long maintenance schedules, that line can then go driverless. As I said, though, it takes decades. It’s easier on lines that are fully self-contained and not connected to anything else, which probably means we will see it first on the Victoria Line (or maybe the Waterloo and City, but that is a tiny two station line). I would like to see London’s tube drivers all sacked as much as anyone else would here, but it’s not going to happen for several decades. So not never, but later rather than sooner.
Read here, for instance. There’s a pro-engineering bias, but no particular pro-driver bias.
http://www.londonreconnections.com/2014/new-tube-london-driverless-train-driver/
The underground railways were built by private enterprise and should be returned to private enterprise.
No “collective bargaining” (see W.H. Hutt “The Strike Threat System” for how this is a government granted power) and so on.
If the private owners believe that driverless trains are the way to go, then that is what will happen.
Michael, in defer to your apparent knowledge on the Tube but is the technology so far fetched considering that roads, cars and pedestrians occupy a far more chaotic space and yet are quickly approaching driverless systems?
Mr. Ed,
Maybe this is what you were referring to, but Heinlein has imagined such a future, and all the potential opportunities for “industrial action” it would afford.
An interesting story, but in 1940 when it was written, it was probably hard for anybody to imagine just how much automation would eventually be possible, and how weak “maintenance” unionization seems to be compared to “operational” unionization. (But then again, how often do people really think of their own jobs, “yeah, a brainless automaton could probably handle most of this work”? Cashiers, especially in fast food, are quickly finding this out!)
Those interested in remote vehicles and some of the complexities might like to look at this as a starting point.
However, while miners are keen to sell the technology as a ticket to safer mine sites, it is also a ticket to cutting costs.
“It should also actually introduce a lot more hours onto the machines, so you can actually use the machinery more because you don’t need lunch breaks, you don’t need crib times or shift changes,” Mr Day said.
And what productivity and efficiency gains essentially boils down to is lower costs for producers and greater returns for investors.
With reduced costs on accommodation, flights and site penalties, some estimate each autonomous truck saves a million dollars per year.
….
Robotic, not remote controlled
The new-generation trucks are not remote controlled, they are truly autonomous.
They have seven in-built safety features which prevent them from colliding with other trucks, allowing them to operate alongside manned vehicles.
To tell it where to go, we have a map of the mine site, which in effect can tell the machine which lanes it can physically go on-site.
BHP’s Tim Day
“It has a GPS and a number of scanners on the front of the machine, and a number of sensors on the machine itself,” Mr Day said.
“In between all of those, it can sense where it’s going around site. To tell it where to go, we have a map of the mine site, which in effect can tell the machine which lanes it can physically go on-site.”
While the trucks do all the heavy lifting, the brains behind the activity sit inside a control room on-site at the mine.
The control room workers are the eyes and ears of the trucks, and it is their job to create a virtual map of the mine and make sure the vehicles stay on course.
It ties in nicely with this tech, which I investigated for an underground nickel mine a few years back. Robotic trucks hadnt even been on the mines radar then.
I cant find the exact company I used then, but in effect you can plot a map of your minesite in 3d, then track every single piece of equipment in real time, if you want to you can even track individual workers.(great for safety as well as production)
I read this morning that tube drivers starting salary is about £50K, rising over time to £60+. Not really chickenfeed even for London. The answer is, as others have suggested here, automate the movement of the trains. The only snag with that is the tube drivers will strike to try and prevent this from happening.
aplofar: Wonderful, very prescient piece, thank you.
Re: the London Underground (most of which is in the open air in fact, I’m told): Sell it for £1 on condition of the introduction of automated trains to a willing private buyer, and let the fun start.
It’s not so much that the technology is far-fetched. It exists, and if you are building a brand new system you undoubtedly use it. It is the transition that is hard. You have a huge, enormously busy and already existing system that you want to change from old technology to new technology, while having it operating throughout the transition. (Engineering upgrades are much easier if you can shut things down while you are doing the upgrade, but you generally can’t. See, for instance, all the problems at London Bridge, where they are essentially tearing down the station and building a new one, but must keep the station working fairly close to normally throughout the period of the rebuild). You have an added and enormous safety aspect – you cannot risk lives by doing anything unproven at any point in the transition.
As a comparison, compare with air traffic control systems. A lot of the time, these work in the same way and with the same technology as they did in the 1960s. If you were designing them from scratch, you wouldn’t do it this way, and you would use a much more computerised and more automated system. But because the existing system exists and generally works, you continue using it, and only upgrade it gradually. There would be all kinds of risks in jumping suddenly to an all new system, so any change has to be slow and incremental, and lots of legacy factors from the way that it has previously been done have to be incorporated.
I can think of two ways around this. 1. Lie. “No, no, we will *always* need a driver. These new trains can’t completely drive themselves. You have nothing to worry about.” And then one day, when you are ready, make all the drivers redundant simultaneously.
2. Have all the intelligence in the train, so that the rest of the system does not need an upgrade. If a human can drive a train *from the train*, then a machine can do it too. Cameras can read existing signals. Ultrasound and radar can detect nearby trains. And so on. It becomes a (really hard) software problem. Solve it and you can automate the tube one train at a time.
Amazing the amount of hatred and jealousy of working class people displayed here.
I do not give a flying fuck what social class they are, Neil. That said, when you consider what train drivers get paid, I would call them middle class, not that is actually matters. And I do not see much jealously, but rather irritation at being held hostage by them.
@Michael Jennings
> In order for a line to go driverless, everything must be upgraded
Perhaps to go driverless. However, hook up a few cameras and the two buttons the drivers have to press to a WiFi connection and have some guy or gal in Nigeria or Vietnam to drive the train. Give him the training he needs and pay him 10% of what the current guys get (which is to say make him the richest person in his town.)
Does anyone know how to say “mind the gap” in Vietnamese?
Of course Paul Marks is right. The problem is that government systems are not run for the putative customers, they are run for the political apparatus and the people who work there.
Neil,
Please do provide an example of the hatred and jealousy that you have ascertained.
However, hook up a few cameras and the two buttons the drivers have to press to a WiFi connection and have some guy or gal in Nigeria or Vietnam to drive the train.
Getting a reliable enough WiFi (or other) data connection into these trains (which are in tiny diameter tunnels which are very deep) is non trivial, particularly given the tiny acceptable failure rates. (The London underground carriers millions of passengers per day, and all of these must be carried safely). There are no cellular networks in these tunnels, and the trains are not air conditioned, simply because the tunnels are too small. You wouldn’t design a system like this today, but you have to live with what the past has given you.
I’m not saying anything is impossible, but it is non-trivial to fix. It is undoubtedly also true that “It’s all about safety” is often used falsely as an argument by people simply trying to protect their cushy jobs, but that doesn’t change the fact that maintaining safety is genuinely quite a lot of work.
Michael Jennings
Getting a reliable enough WiFi (or other) data connection into these trains (which are in tiny diameter tunnels which are very deep) is non trivial
Not as bad as you think, a lot of underground mines use a “leaky feeder” system which is quite reliable, especially when you consider the speed a lot of it goes up.
Piggy backs on the (here we go with “if you designed it you wouldnt”..) existing radio system for the 2 ways and vehicle radios, signal underground is extremely close to line of sight without it.
Actually Id almost be surprised it that system (or similar) isnt already in place for the trains for comms reasons.
http://coastalelectronics.com.au/clients/coastelec/images/item2006/smartcomgraphic.jpg
What the authorities should do is privatise the trains, but leave the railroads in public hands, like roads and streets now. Then trains could compete on lines, and pay a railroad levy to use the tracks.
I understand Perry here. As a former London resident Tube strikes were a Veritas of a pain in the arse. And it is simply this: RMT are not engaged in reasonable industrial action*.
Another issue occurs. “Driving” a Tube train is already a nice little earner involving doing fuck-all. I recall reading recently they were on roughly 50% more than an EasyJet pilot for basically holding a handle. Oh and the assorted T&C (travel perks, 36hr week, yadda) were cool. I have no time for them. They are paid vastly more than bus drivers in London.
You recall Sid James in one of the Carry On movies malingering in hospital because he’d told the Social he was a Hansom Cab light fitter and couldn’t find work? Someone said Tube drivers were essentially another passenger. No. They are ballast. If they really want an antedeluvian career they can go gong farming. Because that wil be the height of aspiration if theses Berties drag us back to the paleolithic.
*My Grandad was a miner. He went on strike over things like safety and getting showers at the pit. In short order management fixed these genuine issues. That is how it is meant to work. He utterly hated Scargill. He saw trough Scargill for the vainglorious Commie twat he was (and is) who was perfectly happy to “fight” the ’84 strike to the last standing miner. Scargill of course suffered nothing. Scargill never gave a flying fuck about the minersbecause they were merely a vehicle to use to attempt Communism in our time. My Grandad was not a member of the NUM. He was a shot-firer. He was aspirational working class and as pit-deputy rank (you don’t trust numpties with dynamite) when he called the lads out you did for a bloody good reason. He also voted Tory. By the time of the ’84 strike he was well out of it and had set-up a very successful window cleaning biz. I guess if you’ve spent that long down a hole then…
Having the tube strike on the same day as the Standard Chartered 5K city run didn’t help.
It was chaos getting from Moorgate to the Bank of England.
Actually Id almost be surprised it that system (or similar) isnt already in place for the trains for comms reasons.
?
Oh, I know for a fact that it is. Is it fast and reliable enough to remotely control all the trains all the time though? You need a system reliable enough that a system-wide failure never occurs. Ever. Even once. I don’t know, although I suspect the answer is that it could be made to work, but considerable development and testing is necessary first.
A big part of the issue here (as mentioned by other people) is that the best way to change is incrementally, which is tricky on such a big and complex system in which every part is interrelated to every other part, and the way that it everything is interrelated has been developed on an ad-hoc basis over more than 150 years. Plus you have people with vested interests who will resist the incremental changes when they realise where they lead.
I am not saying that any of this won’t happen. It’s just not going to be quick,
@Michael Jennings
> You need a system reliable enough that a system-wide failure never occurs.
But the present system just had a system wide failure, didn’t it? People are far and away the most unreliable component of any system.
> A big part of the issue here (as mentioned by other people) is that the best way to change is incrementally,
Technical change is generally best done incrementally (though that is by no means always true.) However, positive political change almost always needs to be done in a big bang. When was the last major victory for liberty? Not sure. Thatcher, Reagan, Berlin Wall? These were all things that happened as a huge revolution. Small changes go toward tyranny in almost all cases. I think tyranny is kind of like your lawn. It grows slowly over time, and the only way to get it under control is to chop it down to size in one fell swoop, on a regular basis.
But you are probably right, I over simplified the challenges. There are a shit load of wires down there though: easy pickings for a data transmission medium, and the isolation of the tunnels is actually a good thing — WiFi has limited capacity so keeping the transmission in one tunnel at a time is a pretty good thing, then route it to cables running up the elevator shafts to get it above ground and out onto the public net.
On the other hand the idea of allowing TfL to apply cyber security to something like that is really rather terrifying…