Driverless Trains--Is L.A. on Right Track? : Transit: When they work well, riders are delighted. But success in other cities may not mean much here.

As soon as the operator’s words boomed across the control room--”Gate alarm!”--they were echoed by the safety officer with an additional, critical detail:

“Gate alarm at New Westminster!”

Somebody had jumped a gate at the New Westminster station of the SkyTrain driverless train system, alighting on the tracks.

Computers swiftly closed the station and de-energized the rails to avoid electrocuting the intruder. Cameras videotaped the man for future prosecution as he hopped to the platform on the opposite side of the station and calmly walked out.

A new train was swiftly dispatched to replace the one delayed by the intruder, and normal service resumed. All in three minutes. SkyTrain worked.

It is this kind of safety, efficiency and convenience that driverless-train advocates such as Mayor Tom Bradley say they want to duplicate in Los Angeles, on the Metro Green Line from Norwalk to El Segundo.

But does this kind of dazzling technology come cheap? Would it be a better deal for Los Angeles than the more traditional rail systems controlled by drivers? Success in other cities may not mean much for Los Angeles.

For one thing, the system proposed for Los Angeles would be built by different companies, would use different technology and would work under different conditions than any other system in the world. Therefore, it is impossible to turn to existing French, Canadian or British equipment to get an exact preview of what might be in store.

One feature that the Green Line would share with other lines is high-tech train-control computers. Los Angeles County Transportation Commission officials chose to develop their own rather than buy an existing model because they did not want to be wed to one company when they expand the system to Torrance and Marina del Rey.

Critics, however, worry that unique train controls would force Los Angeles to suffer service interruptions the way other cities did while working the bugs out of their systems--computer failures in Vancouver, mechanical glitches in London and power outages in Lille, France.

Critics add that unlike the designers of other driverless systems, Los Angeles Metro Rail engineers no longer claim that the Green Line’s computer-controlled trains would be able to run any faster, more often or less expensively than conventional, driver-operated vehicles.

The 41 driverless trains and the computer-controlled signaling equipment needed to operate them are estimated to cost $97 million more than conventional equipment, a key element in the system’s inflation past the $1-billion mark. The cost is more than three times what was expected as recently as last summer and LACTC engineers now say that lower operating costs are unlikely to compensate for these higher construction costs. But the assumption that the system would pay off in lower operating costs was a key reason for automation.

Vancouver officials such as Mayor Gordon Campbell warn that driverless technology makes sense for them only because of what it can save in operating costs.

“The (SkyTrain) system, as built, works. There’s no question about that. Riders like it,” said Campbell, a sometime SkyTrain critic. “But the capital (construction) costs are much higher. There’s also no question about that.

“What you have to do--in Vancouver or Los Angeles--is evaluate the cost-effectiveness. You really have to decide if what you save in operating costs will cover the higher capital costs.”

Larry Ward, president of British Columbia Rapid Transit Co. Ltd., which operates Skytrain, was more direct.

“We can show increases in passengers and increases in kilometers with little increases in operating costs,” he said. “If you don’t have an operating plan that does that, I don’t know how you justify (driverless technology).”

On the plus side are the elements of a driverless system that attract Bradley and others. When they work well, they delight passengers--and the companies that run them.

That is largely because the absence of drivers makes it much easier and cheaper to run more trains more often. That reduces the amount of time that passengers spend waiting at stations, which has been found by researchers to be one of the greatest disincentives to using public transit. Shorter waits also mean shorter travel times.

When paying a driver, a transit system must try to get its money’s worth by putting as many passengers in the train as possible. For example, a system might try to use six-car trains. But such trains may fill up only if they do not arrive too often, so the time between trains, or “headway,” might be lengthened to 12 minutes.

A driverless train system with the same number of vehicles could run three-car trains every six minutes, or two-car trains every four minutes--without increasing its payroll. Average waits for riders could be cut by two-thirds at no cost to the transit district.

SkyTrain can operate 28 trains during rush hour--one train every 90 seconds--with only four people in its control room. Tickets are checked and safety and security maintained by uniformed SkyTrain attendants who roam designated beats.

In Vancouver and elsewhere, frequent service has been credited with drawing far more riders than a comparable conventional light-rail system would attract. This claim is supported by large increases in off-peak, or midday, passengers--people who shop, run errands or visit friends on public transit instead of driving, even though rush-hour traffic has long since dissipated.

More riders mean more income, while fewer drivers mean fewer salaries. That adds up to lower operating costs, an important factor in compensating for the much greater cost of building such systems.

Building costs are higher because such systems must have tracks all to themselves--expensive subways or elevated guideways that do not cross automobile traffic, as the Los Angeles-to-Long Beach Blue Line does. A driverless train also requires more elaborate track signals and computer controls than trains operated by drivers.

“You have cars that are much smarter than the conventional light-rail car, and you pay for that technology,” said Ward, president of the company that operates Vancouver’s SkyTrain.

In addition, driverless systems must have costly security features--extensive closed-circuit television and sophisticated electronic intrusion detectors--to make sure tracks remain clear of people and such urban detritus as abandoned sofas, wrecked cars and stop signs.

This has been a problem in Vancouver, where 13 people have been killed by driverless trains since the system opened in 1986. Ward said 10 of those victims, including a woman last week, were suicides who would not have been spared by driver-operated trains.

Of the remaining three, one was a teen-ager who had climbed a 24-foot-tall section of SkyTrain track before the system had opened. A test train struck and killed him.

Another was a suspected criminal who tried to evade Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers by hiding on the track. The third was a woman who apparently suffered a seizure in a station, fell between two trains and was crushed before she could set off track-bed sensors that would have stopped traffic.

SkyTrain officials discovered early the vulnerability of driverless trains. In 1985, a vandal uprooted a stop sign and its concrete base and threw them over a 10-foot fence onto a section of track not protected by intrusion detectors. A train smacked into it at 50 m.p.h.

Ward said damage was minor, but the incident is still raising questions about safety--in Los Angeles.

California critics, such as transit activists and Rapid Transit District workers, note that the Green Line will run down the center of Interstate 105, the Century Freeway. They wonder what will happen if the tracks were blocked by wrecked cars, spilled furniture or some other flotsam often seen blowing around the freeways.

“What happens if a load of lumber spills on the track?” asked one skeptical RTD employee. “There’s a good chance there is going to be nothing there to tell them not to proceed through at 55 m.p.h.”

Ed McSpedon, president of Rail Construction Corp., the LACTC’s construction subsidiary, said car-pool lanes will separate the Green Line from truck traffic and concrete barriers will separate trains from car pools. The design was approved by the rail safety branch of the state Public Utilities Commission.

“The PUC requires that we have a tall fence on top of those concrete barriers,” McSpedon said. “Years ago, we checked with the California Highway Patrol to see how often trucks and cars break through those barriers. The number was zero.”

To warn operators of collisions or climbers, he added, the fence will be equipped with electronic intrusion detectors similar to those used in Vancouver, Atlanta and elsewhere. “Anti-terrorist” fencing will be installed on overpasses to deter people from dropping items onto the tracks, he added.

Still, safety issues--real or imagined--have kept some fully automated systems one step shy of driverless. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District built the world’s first automated rapid transit system 20 years ago, a feat applauded and built on by many cities that followed.

But concerns about safety and public acceptance--particularly acute after initial systemwide bugs had trains do such things as roll off the tracks at the end of a line--has led BART to staff trains with people who drive only if computers fail. Their primary job is opening and closing doors.

Of all the driverless train services, the VAL trains in Lille, France, boast the best operating record. Glass screens along platform edges have kept even determined suicides off its tracks; not a single death or major injury has been attributed to the system.

“The Lille population is totally satisfied with its Metro,” said reporter Dominique Ferra of the newspaper Voix du Nord. “There have been no injuries. You can’t even kill yourself. . . . The only technical problems have been weather-related, such as short circuits caused by ice or wind blowing debris on the track.”

VAL’s success is confirmed by its popularity. The system is being duplicated in four cities and at the airports of three others. In Taipei, Taiwan, a VAL system is scheduled to open this year, followed in coming years by systems in Toulouse, Bordeaux and Rennes, France.

Airports in Paris, Chicago and Jacksonville, Fla., have bought small versions of the system for shuttling passengers among terminals. These smaller driverless systems, also found in some inner cities and a few universities, are usually referred to as automated guideway transit, or “people mover” systems. Sometimes disdained as horizontal elevators, they are considered distinct from driverless rail transit lines because of their small cars and short routes.

At the other end of the scale from VAL is the Docklands Light Railway, a poorly engineered, badly planned system that has been cuttingly re-christened the “Docklands Blight Railway” and “Light Failway” by some Londoners who use it.

Connecting London with a vast new East End riverfront redevelopment area called the Isle of Dogs, the 4-year-old system has been plagued by remarkably memorable problems from the day it opened.

On that first day, a car carrying Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh malfunctioned, refusing to open its doors at the correct stop. Or any other stop. The line was immediately closed for a month.

Later, the opposite problem dogged the system. Doors would automatically open at West India Quay--but long before the station there was built. Software running the system was written with the assumption that the station would open before it did.

For the most part, the doors do not open. One of the riders’ biggest complaints is the number of broken doors plastered with “No Entry” signs. Other popular complaints concern drafty, rain-swept, open-air stations, broken destination signs, balky ticket machines--and very serious overcrowding.

Often, the system gets so overloaded that it overtaxes the train-control computers, shutting down all service. The system’s computerized train controls were designed to coordinate nine trains at a time and 15,000 riders a day, but because of greater-than-predicted office development in the area it must sometimes cope with 17 trains and 15,000 passengers an hour.

Once the computers crash, trains must all be driven under manual control--at no more than 10 m.p.h.--to the next station before automated operation can resume. This is said to happen about 10 times each month, often enough that each train now has a “captain” aboard at all times.

A new train-control system, based on the one used by SkyTrain, is being installed to try to improve service. In the meantime, workers sent in to fix the troubled system no longer hop the train to get to their job sites. They ride bicycles to work.

Ironically, the Docklands line was built to serve a high-tech center, as is the Metro Green Line. But operators found that stray currents from the high-tech concerns could trip the railway’s sensitive electronic control system, shutting down the line.

Vancouver’s SkyTrain experienced similar, though not nearly as drastic, computer anomalies, primarily when it was extended over the Fraser River to the fast-growing town of Surrey in the spring of 1990. Computer malfunctions shut down the entire system three times in one month.

After each collapse occurs, SkyTrain employees have to make their way to each train, either by walking on the track or riding in another train on a parallel track, then manually drive it until computers can again fix and track its position. Rush-hour shutdowns have lasted as long as two hours as drivers made their way to each of 28 trains on the system.

A manually operated car collided with a computer-controlled train in the train yard one day in September, 1990, shutting the system down for two hours at the start of the morning rush.

Since then, the debugged software has failed only once, during a morning rush hour in June, 1991. The system was down for two hours.

“Using new technology is always a leap of faith,” said Ward. “But when you look at the ability to move a lot more people a lot faster (than manually operated trains), it is a lot more attractive.”

Assuming that people want to pay the price.

Vancouver is now mapping plans for two SkyTrain extensions. One, to the northeastern suburb of Coquitlam, will likely have driverless trains. The longer leg, past Vancouver International Airport to the southern suburb of Richmond, is less certain.

Campbell, Vancouver’s mayor, said that a conventional light-rail line to Richmond would cost perhaps $375 million; a SkyTrain extension would be nearly twice that. Driverless trains are nice, the mayor said, but “we can’t afford another one.”

Times researchers Sarah White in Paris and Fleur Melville in London contributed to this report.

Getting on Track

Here is a look at other driverless train systems operating around the world. Some of those systems work well, others do not. Comparisons to Los Angeles’ Metro Green Line may be inconclusive because each system has its own design, specifications and maker. LILLE, FRANCE

Name: VAL.

Manufacturer: Matra Transport, France.

Year opened: 1983.

Description: Subway and surface track, rubber tires on concrete guideways, conventional 750-volt, direct-current motors fed by guide bars on the ground.

Passengers: 39.2 million annually.

System size: 83 two-car sets; two lines, 15.7 miles long; 34 stations.

Construction cost per mile: $59.2 million, $89.6 million for subway.

Advantages: Very safe, frequent service, high ridership, economical to operate.

Disadvantages: Very expensive to build, occasional power outages.

VANCOUVER, CANADA

Name: SkyTrain.

Manufacturer: Cars by UTDC, Canada; train control by Alcatel, Canada.

Year opened: 1986.

Description: Elevated track with some surface and subway track, steel wheels on steel rails, 600-volt, direct-current linear induction motors fed by third rail on the ground.

Passengers: 23.3 million annually.

System size: 114 cars; one line, 15.2 miles long; 17 stations.

Construction cost per mile: $60.4 million.

Advantages: Frequent service, large and growing ridership, economical to operate.

Disadvantages: Expensive to build, computer failures interrupt service, some deaths.

LONDON

Name: Docklands Light Railway.

Manufacturers: Cars by Linke-Hofmann-Busch, Germany, and BN, Belgium; train control by Alcatel, Canada.*

Year opened: 1987.

Description: Elevated track, steel wheels on steel rails, 750-volt, direct-current motors fed by a third rail on the ground.

Passengers: 8.5 million annually.

System size: 21 cars (70 more on order); two lines, 7.5 miles long; 15 stations.

Construction cost per mile: $19 million.**

Advantages: Relatively inexpensive, much higher ridership than expected.

Disadvantages: Frequent breakdowns, severe overcrowding, broken doors, broken destination signs, windy platforms.

LOS ANGELES

Name: Metro Green Line.

Manufacturers: Cars by Sumitomo; train control by Union Switch & Signal.***

Year opened: Scheduled for mid-1995.

Description: Elevated track with some surface and subway track, steel wheels on steel rails, alternating-current motor fed by overhead wires.

Passengers: 9.1 million annually.****

System size: 41 cars; one line, 23 miles long; 16 stations.

Construction cost per mile: $47.8 million.****

Advantages: Possiblity of frequent and flexible service.

Disadvantages: Uncertain construction costs, unproven technology.

NOTES: * Alcatel is developing a new train control system for Docklands Light Railway.

** Cost will rise as unsatisfactory cars and train controls are replaced by larger equipment.

*** Metro Green Line construction contract awards subject to review Jan. 22.

**** Estimated.

SOURCES: 1991 Jane’s Urban Transport Systems, Los Angeles Times