Robotaxis Roll Through City Streets. America Still Can’t Run a Subway Without a Driver.
(SeaPRwire) –
By: Marcus Cole
Robotaxis roll through city streets with no one holding the wheel. America’s subways still put a human in the cab. The paradox should be embarrassing. Fixed-rail systems have predictable paths, controlled infrastructure, and schedules. On-road autonomous vehicles deal with pedestrians, cyclists, and unpredictable behavior. Baruch Feigenbaum, senior managing director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, put the gap in one line: “the transit world is where innovation goes to die.” He is right. But the reason isn’t technical. It’s institutional. And it goes back to a single crash in Washington, D.C., fifteen years ago.
The Fort Totten collision killed nine people and injured many more in 2009. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed a maintenance problem in the automated signaling system. Not the automation. Not the software. A maintenance failure in the system that separates trains. But the political damage was permanent. Randy Clarke, CEO of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, acknowledged the crash “paralyzed” Metro’s plans for further automation. A single catastrophic event became the regulatory ceiling for the entire sector. The legal framework shifted from engineering risk assessment to political liability management. Unions didn’t need to prove automation was inherently dangerous. They needed to show it once failed catastrophically. After Fort Totten, the burden of proof flipped permanently. Every future safety question starts from the assumption that machines have already killed people. The crash was fifteen years ago. The paralysis is still in place.
Honolulu has been running its Skyline automated light metro for three years. Zero crashes. Zero injuries. Vance Tsuda, the system’s project director, argues that human operators are actually more dangerous than machines. A human is far more likely to overlook an open door or prematurely clear a train for departure. “If you have somebody making that decision, they could make a wrong decision,” he said. The Skyline is the most expansive automated transit system in the United States. It will stretch to 19 miles when completed. Detroit and Miami opened elevated driverless trains in the 1980s as pilot projects. Memphis ran an automated monorail. It closed years ago. Jacksonville’s Skyway is halting operations indefinitely due to budget cuts. The pattern repeats: automation starts, stalls, and dies before it scales. The only sustained success is a single elevated system in the Pacific, far from where transit policy is actually shaped.
John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union, calls transit automation “a catastrophe waiting to happen.” His argument centers on emergency evacuation. Passengers left dealing with self-evacuation on a third-rail system is a nightmare scenario. He has fought off automation efforts in New York and elsewhere. David King, an associate professor at Arizona State University, frames the problem differently. “We allow a certain amount of failure with private industry that we don’t tolerate when the state does it,” he said. SpaceX blows up rockets. NASA cannot. The comparison is structurally accurate. Public transit operates under a zero-tolerance standard. Every crash becomes a political scandal. Every maintenance failure becomes a news cycle. King noted that the success rate has to remain perfect to keep public trust. That is a standard no other industry in the United States operates under. No other sector treats one incident as proof of systemic failure.
The DC Red Line upgrade is nearly $1 billion. The Board of Directors backed it in April. Trains could run without a human worker in the cab as early as 2033. That is still a decade away at the earliest. The plan includes protective barriers to keep passengers off the tracks. Los Angeles is pursuing something more ambitious. The Sepulveda Project would build a completely automated underground line beneath the Santa Monica Mountains. The mountains divide the Westside employment hub from the San Fernando Valley, creating one of the worst traffic bottlenecks in the country. The new proposal would use shorter, more frequent trains. Station doors would protect passengers on the platform. Cecily Way, who oversees planning for the project at LA Metro, confirmed the design is in environmental review. What is missing from every one of these plans is a credible transition framework for the workers. The machines are ready. The institutions are not. Until someone writes a labor contract that addresses what happens to the operators when the cab goes empty, the next decade of American transit will be exactly what Feigenbaum described.
Author bio: Marcus Cole, a labor law researcher and contributor to independent administrative law reviews, with a focus on institutional labor disputes, regulatory friction in public-sector technology deployment, and the economics of infrastructure modernization.