The London tube network is in an almost complete shutdown this week, as members of the Rail, Maritime, and Transport Union (RMT) are on a walk-out over a dispute related to pay and working hours. According to Transport for London (TfL), the average tube driver starting salary is over £70,000; Eddie Dempsey, general secretary of RMT, stated that it was not an exorbitant salary as one still couldn’t buy a house in London earning that amount. The two wolves within me, the one that hates wasteful spending, and the one that wishes young people could dream of owning a home, are really battling it out over this.
While Londoners are no stranger to strikes, tube worker strikes get on people’s nerves more than most, not least because of the severe disruption to everyday life that they cause, or the fact that they increase cycling accidents by almost a third. No, they annoy people largely because drivers do, if we’re being honest, get paid an awful lot (in UK terms) for a job that really doesn’t seem too difficult. Only in June a tube driver was sacked after it emerged that he was watching videos on his phone and knitting while driving one of the tubes. And who says men can’t multitask?
All of this has revived the argument about whether we should seriously consider automating the London Underground. The idea of driverless tubes is not hypothetical; there are many instances around the world of just such a thing operating efficiently, effectively, and safely. It was almost a decade and a half ago that the automation of Line 1 of the Paris metro was completed, converting it to driverless operation with full automation. It wasn’t cheap, costing around € 600m, but it worked. Being French, I’m sure the former metro drivers found something else they could strike over before too long.
Why? Because the British people are owed something at this point
The Copenhagen metro is even more of a success story. Opening in 2002, the metro is fully driverless and fully automated, and by 2023 carried 120 million passengers a year. I visited Copenhagen that year, and the difference between it and the London Underground system was stark. There was no graffiti in the trains, the several stations that I travelled to and from were clean, free from litter and depressing advertisements, and there were no dodgy young men hanging around outside (or inside) them, even late at night.
In London, the principle of automating the Underground is no different. Upgrading the network to accommodate driverless operation would require replacing signalling systems, rebuilding many stations to install platform-edge doors, the kind of which have operated at stations like Canary Wharf for a long time, and creating a central control to oversee it all. Indeed, parts of the network, such as the District Light Railway (DLR), have been automated for some time, even though it can, and does, have a driver relatively often.
As with everything in the UK these days, the main obstacle is not the absence of technical ability, but rather the cost of doing so. Earlier this year, the Mayor of London revealed that the cost of automating three of the oldest Underground would amount to around £20 billion, even without factoring in some of the structural changes to stations that such an undertaking would necessitate. Five years ago, a leaked internal TfL document stated that introducing driverless trains would cost £7 billion and would be “poor value for money” for the taxpayer.
As the person who left your secondary school aged fourteen (who you haven’t seen since) is wont to post on the village Facebook group, it’s not the money, it’s the principle. People in this country are growing tired of the apparent lack of progress that we must suffer, with the only things that ever seem to get developed are student accommodation buildings, listed buildings that have mysteriously become victims of arson attacks, and, as ever, brownfield sites in Canary Wharf.
Big infrastructure projects in the UK have a way of never really happening as we would wish. HS2 had its entire northern leg cancelled, only to be replaced with a privately funded rail line because the Government ran out of ideas for creating jobs in the north. Former Economic Secretary and City Minister Emma Reynolds didn’t know where the Lower Thames Crossing would be or how much it would cost, despite the Government committing an additional £590 million to it. Even projects with fantastic end results like the Elizabeth Line go vastly over budget and face delays of several years.
But, and it’s a very large but, we should still automate the London Underground network. It may not save any money, it may cause delays for several years, and it might end up only automating the western hemisphere of the Circle Line, but it should still be done. Why? Because the British people are owed something at this point.
It is too disheartening for Nick, 30, to see, while commuting for an hour each way to work each morning and evening, that the person who drives his train can watch their Netflix brain-rot series while knitting, and earn twice as much as him for the pleasure.
For all the Fraser Nelson comments in the world, the average person does not see anything changing for the better, even if the (cherrypicked) statistics tell a different story. We owe it to future Londoners to commit to doing something revolutionary, just as the Victorians began the project for those of them still to come. It’s not just about getting value for money. Sometimes, we just want to spend our money on things that make us happy. And it is our money, after all.
