Early one morning, sometime late in 2020, more than a dozen light rail trains will come to life at Honolulu Area Rapid Transit’s yard in Waipahu. Each will set out on its own, with no operator aboard, following only computer-issued instructions, to begin its daily run. The United States will finally have its first fully automated, driverless, high-capacity urban rail transit system.
Andrew Robbins, chief executive officer of HART, calls it a “game changer.”
Across the world, there are 63 fully automated public transit lines in 42 cities in 19 countries. Places such as Copenhagen, Paris, and Singapore.
One of the largest systems has been in operation since 1985 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Vancouver SkyTrain carries half a million riders a day and, at peak times, operates on 108-second headways.
Robbins sees Vancouver’s high-frequency operation as a model. There, greater frequency helped increase transit ridership because passengers know they won’t have to wait long minutes for the next train.
“The idea is that these trains run just like a utility,” he explains. “There’s always a train coming.”
That’s made possible by shorter trains running more frequently. HART will have 20 four-car trainsets, with 17 running during peak operations, each carrying up to 800 riders. Robbins expects that Honolulu’s eventual 20-mile line will carry 120,000 riders daily in 2030.
To be considered fully automated, or what engineers call “Grade of Automation 4,” trains must be capable of automatic starting, stopping, and completely unattended operation. They must be able to respond to emergencies, such as an obstructed track, without onboard attendants.
Advocates cite greater safety, reliability, and operational flexibility as major benefits of automation.
Computer-Controlled Train Operations
HART’s $8.2 billion, entirely elevated line will serve a population of nearly one million along an area squeezed between mountains and sea.
“It’s a rail transit planner’s dream because it’s a linear corridor,” says Robbins. It’s also a region with congested traffic and two-hour commutes, crying out for a faster way to get around.
The transit line was always envisioned as a driverless system. Along with the ability to run trains more frequently, the economics allow for greater flexibility.
“During the day, depending on the demand, we can add trains and take trains off completely driverless,” Robbins says.
Lack of qualified operators on duty or on call will never prevent HART from responding to unexpected passenger loads. Future expansion becomes more manageable with a driverless system as well. There’s no need to hire and train additional operators; you just add more trains.
Hitachi Rail Italy is providing the trains as well as the signal, train control, communications, power, and passenger information systems. The vehicles are being assembled in Pittsburg, Calif.
At the Operations Control Center, just five attendants run everything. Workstations monitor trains and dispatching, security, traction power, and fare collections. At the passenger interface station, an attendant can send messages to trains or stations and respond to passengers who communicate via onboard intercoms from each rail car.
The 12-track rail yard is completely automated. It’s already being tested, and test trains are running on an energized portion of the main line.
HART has completed construction on the first 10 miles of the guideway. Nine stations along that segment will be finished by the end of 2019, allowing operations to begin the following year. The next segment, which will serve the Pearl Harbor naval base and Honolulu International Airport, is 50 percent complete and scheduled to be in service by 2023.
Robbins says they expect to award a design-build contract for the final, city-center segment early next year and have it completed in 2025. That contract will also include operation and maintenance of the entire line through 2050.
There’s a good reason for that: building a system with such leading-edge technology risks the scourge of obsolescence, of the kind which forces us to replace our smartphones and laptops every few years.
“Obsolescence management is a growing focus in the rail transit industry,” Robbins reveals. By engaging a private-sector partner and charging them with running and maintaining the system to high performance standards, HART transfers that risk and responsibility to the contractor.
According to the Brussels-based International Association of Public Transport, total system miles of grade 4 lines will more than double by 2025 from the 650 currently in operation.
Along with airport trams, a handful of low-capacity automated lines operate in the United States. They include Detroit’s single-track People Mover; the Las Vegas monorail; the Jacksonville, Fla., Skyway; and the JFK AirTrain in New York City. All are operations carrying fewer than 300 passengers per train.
Several grade 2 operations, which are substantially automated but require an operator in the cab, are also running in the U.S. San Francisco’s Muni and Bay Area Rapid Transit are among these, along with the Washington Metro and Atlanta’s MARTA.
With coming projects, North America will begin to catch up with Europe and Asia, which together have three-quarters of the world’s fully automated lines. Most of that is concentrated in France, South Korea, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates.
“Cities across the country have to deal with a transportation marketplace that is changing, they have to deal with demographics that are changing, and the question for local decision makers is what have you done to react to this world that is changing around your transit system,” says Steven Higashide, director of research at Transit Center.
Cities will look at their transit network holistically, at how it serves the both city and the needs of all users across the region. Urban planners and real estate developers will seize opportunities to connect transportation with jobs, housing, and lifestyle. Transit agencies will help provide each customer’s door-to-door solution, through innovation, partnerships, and digital integration.
“We’re approaching 2020 pretty quickly and there’s going to be a lot of fun innovations that start off the decade,” proclaims Adam Cohen, a researcher at the Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Research Center.
It might start with a couple of mainland tourists standing on an open-air platform in Honolulu as a warm breeze wafts off the Pacific Ocean. A sleek, driverless four-car train whooshes into the station. As it comes to a stop, train doors and platform gates silently slide open together. The visitors go to the front of the train for an unobstructed view. As the train rolls high above traffic, blue water on one side and green mountains on the other, they might think, “Wow, this is really fun.”
BART was to be fully automatic. But that never happened. The trains do run in auto mode most of the time but there are plenty of problems that need human intervention. Biggest problem now is crime on the trains and in stations. An operator can call BART police; no so easy without that employee. I can imagine passengers getting locations and descriptions screwed up.
good articles, I have always rode public transit to work, dont like the hassle of driving, but people don’t want to give up their cars. My Dad could walk to work at nearby Frisco yard so he never drove to work either. They keep redoing highways constantly and they do get government subsidies. Need to get people out of cars and onto light rail or buses, Some places do use it, worked with a lady who moved to St. L from NYC and bought her first car, never used one in NYC. And Chicago has a great transit system too, Metra has many riding their trains.
Just because something is technologically possible doesn’t make it a wonderful idea. I suppose there is no technical reason that passenger airliners can be made autonomous as well, with no expensive cockpit crew, but who thinks that will happen? Who would tolerate it? Indeed, I suspect that the prospects for autonomous vehicles will be considerably diminished by a really horrific multi-vehicle accident involving an autonomous tractor-trailer.
Carl: what is any different in regards to crime, etc from today’s systems where the driver is inaccessible?
Since these systems will be automated what about crime, passengers being robbed, station hygiene, how will they be cleaned and maintained? Response time for people that need medial help? And things like this.
A fully automated system like HART has to be elevated with no grade crossings, etc. I would like to see the incremental increase in the cost of a fully elevated or isolated system compared the cost of a more traditional system. I understand the cost overruns for HART have been eye popping.
What made Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) financially feasible was the ability to build most of it over abandoned rail lines or along low volume freight lines.
Correct , William. The tendency to add cars to existing trains to cater for growth is counter productive. Far batter to add frequency, though doing so on manned systems adds crew costs. But if you look at the overall costs of a system, it would still make sense to add trains rather than cars. Its just the bigger is better mentality that most rail and transit operators have. Last week I was in a smallish city with sketchy bus service, what did i see coming down the road , a brand new double decker bus. no doubt brought for its increased capacity , but it will never be more than 1/2 full , and still 1/2 hourly service.
I see full automation as a vital step in the right direction toward a more effective transit system for the reasons outlined above: cost reduction and ability to match frequency to passenger demand. A major drawback to transit systems is the wait time between trains, even when that time is known, there’s nothing like being able to go out to your car, turn the key, and be on your way. If transit can’t match that, it is at a disadvantage.
Then there is the problem of too many stations (which dramatically increases cost and slows down overall transit time for passengers) and too few stations (which means not enough origin-destination pairs to generate enough traffic.) Automation could help there by skipping stops where no passengers are waiting, or when a train is so full that it wouldn’t be able to take on more passengers. This would work better with shorter trains carring fewer people each.
Those are both low speed operations. BART is fully automated, but there has always been an operator to open the doors (and because in 1972 people weren’t ready for fully automated operation.
I believe there is an automated people mover at the University of West Virginia that has been in service for a long time as well.
Isn’t the Detroit People Mover fully automated? It’s a 30-year-old system, so Honolulu seems to have missed by about 30 years.