Driverless trains axed by TfL

Admin

December 5, 2024
2 min read

Plans to launch driverless trains on the Tube have been scrapped after a Transport for London (TfL) investigation. In responding to a written question from Reform UK’s London Assembly member, mayor Sadiq Khan said the trains “would cost billions of pounds on each line.” Wilson asked if the advantages would “far outweigh the costs,” pointing to driverless transport in Paris, Tokyo, and Barcelona.

But the mayor concluded that work to roll-out driverless trains “shouldn’t be progressed any further” during Mayor’s Question Time.

“Learning from other metros around the world, particularly Paris, which provided input into the work, the most practicable way of conversion would be for it to coincide with the introduction of new rolling stock, signalling and platform edge doors at the same time as part of a line upgrade,” he said. “This would be needed to justify the high costs.”

Boris Johnson said that driverless trains should be a condition of any future funding for TfL when he was Prime Minster in 2020. This came after his mayoral campaign in 2012 that the tube would get driverless trains in a decade.

The Docklands Light Railway (DLR) already uses driverless trains. But drivers’ union Aslef has called the proposal a “politically-driven fantasy.”

“Leaked internal Transport for London documents demonstrate that it would cost an additional £7 billion,” Finn Brennan, Aslef’s organiser on the London Underground, said in 2020, “on top of the money needed to upgrade existing lines, to make Underground trains driverless and that TfL has concluded that there is, given the evidence, no economic case for doing so.”

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