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Gurney: It is evidence. It’s an interesting aspect of the Toronto collective psyche. We embrace change, but only after it’s put in place, and we fight like 20 armies to make sure it never happens at all. If Toronto did move to driverless trains, sure, eventually, we’d all get used to it, and then have a hard time remembering what life had been like before. So I guess in that sense, we’d mature enough to handle drone trains. But until it was actually implemented, we would fight it tooth and nail, and moan and groan and whine. But there’s another part of this story that speaks to how slowly change comes to Toronto — on top of the (desperately needed) automated signalling system, in order to go to driverless trains, Toronto would need safety barriers in all stations. These barriers would prevent access to the track, except through doors that would align with the train’s doors (and would only open when a train was in the station). We’ve been planning to install these for years, since they would eliminate the risk of people jumping, falling or being pushed into the tracks in stations. And we’re still years away from installing them, because there’s no money and no appetite to provide the needed funds. When we can actually agree to put up safety barriers, I’ll believe we’re up to trying robo-subways.

Unless subway drivers are reassigned to become full-time lobbyists for a relief line, I’m not sure what substantial difference any of this makes

Goldsbie: The TTC is already planning to go down to one staffer per train once the new signalling system is fully up and running on the Yonge-University-Spadina line. (Currently, each train has both an operator at the front and a guard about two-thirds of the way back.) I’m not sure what’s so objectionable about seeing how that works out, before deciding whether to reduce crews any further. It’s quite possible that the remaining operator will prove valuable for, say, braking the train in the event of a track-level emergency or determining the safest moment to close the doors. It’s also possible that their responsibilities could turn out to be minimal and that they might be better put to work assisting crowds in the stations. The potential savings strike me as overstated, since any employee who’s no longer staffing a train could probably be deployed elsewhere in the system to improve the running of another element. As such, these floated measures should probably be viewed less as a cutting of costs than as a maximization of resources. But it all comes back to the same issue: the YUS line is perilously close to absolute capacity at rush hour, and sooner than later we’re going to run out of cheap tricks to address that. Automatic train control will allow vehicles to run closer together, but it’s merely a short-term solution to bump capacity by a small margin. Unless subway drivers are reassigned to become full-time lobbyists for a relief line, I’m not sure what substantial difference any of this makes.