News Wire: Railroaders, public speak out against automated trains

[Brian Schmidt]

WASHINGTON — The Federal Railroad Administration is seeking public input on the operation of driverless trains and, so far, it appears railroaders and the public are overwhelmingly against the idea. In March, the FRA announced it wanted public...

http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2018/04/24-railroaders-public-speak-out-against-automated-trains

[Euclid]

I have never seen a topic with so many opposing facets as driverless vehicles including private automobiles, commercial trucks, and trains.  Driverless cars may be statistically safer than manually driven cars because drivers cannot be depended on to follow the laws.  But driverless cars can never fully assimilate all of the potential variables.  And standby manual drivers will be lulled into complacency by the automatic driver, and therefore will be less likely to react to an emergency and take over manual driving. 

The movement toward driverless private automobiles is 100% political with its foundation being the “Green Movement” and Public Safety. That is why government has fallen head over heels in love with driverless cars.  A government that loves to agonize over every little detail of public safety has conspicuously thrown caution to wind when it comes to the perils of cars driven by robots. 

Recently a bicyclist was killed by a driverless Uber car.  This ought to be quite newsworthy because if flies in the face of what we have been promised.  Yet I have not seen any news report of exactly what went wrong. From what I did see reported, I conclude that the Uber car never braked.  The news seemed to forgive that because they reported that the bicyclist entered the roadway, in conflict with the Uber car’s right of way, and it was too late for Uber to react. 

Yet, other details indicate that, at that point, the bicycle lane moves out of its right side of the road position, moves left, and crosses over the car lane in which the Uber car was traveling, and then reenters the exclusive bike lane on the left side of the car lane that it just crossed.  So, if this is the case, this is a traffic control structure conflict in which either bike riders or motor vehicle must yield to each other.  And yet I did not see any news that detailed this point of which party had the right of way.  But from the regulatory point of view, driverless cars are as much of an agenda as pedestrian and bicyclist’s rights.  It appears that those agendas came into conflict in the case of this Uber/bicyclist fatality. 

Government believes that automatic cars will solve all the problems of the private automobile that public sector officials seem to resent so much.  Therefore, I suspect that driverless cars will be a lot more like automated mass transit than our dear old private, symbol-of-freedom, automobile.

The public sector is virtually in bed with the driverless car industry in mutually overpromising this brave new world of automatic cars.  There is big money in selling the future with grandiose promises such as automatic cars and colonizing Mars.  The entire driverless car movement will be publically financed, including the roads, the testing, and the manufacturing.  It will be something like the nationalization of private transportation.   

Adding to the green movement motivation for driverless cars is the commercially competitive advantage for applying the technology to driverless trucks.  Even the government will have to stop and catch its breath when it fully realizes stakes of automatic car riders mingling with 500-ton platoons of driverless semi-trucks. Ultimately, this problem will probably be solved by putting the government into the business of building an entire new roadway infrastructure exclusively dedicated to driverless trucks.  Similarly, the driverless car roadways will need to be substantially upgraded with lots of new technology and roofs to keep the weather off the roads.  Ultimately, it may come to people just staying home to do their texting.

This entire driverless buzz has placed driverless trains on the table.  In one sense, they would be easiest to automate because they have dedicated corridors and are mechanically self-guiding.  But because the self-guiding allows such large vehicles, the cost of the operator is relative low compared to trucks.  So the economic motive is the lowest with self-driving trains.     

However, that is just the economic motive for reducing train operating cost.  There is also an economic motive for the suppliers of PTC installation to continue that lucrative opportunity by installing automated running of trains.  Other than BNSF, I have not heard much about the various railroad company positions on engineerless trains.  But BNSF in particular seems to be embracing technology.  Maybe they will build the first railroad on Mars.