Considering we’ve needed an easier way to travel between Brooklyn and Queens like, yesterday–since riders are currently forced to transfer across multiple subway lines or take an obnoxiously long detour through Manhattan–NYC’s Interborough Express (IBX) has quickly become one of the city’s most anticipated transit projects. And while progress has been slow, it is happening: this past July, the MTA board approved the full design, and now an NYC urban planning research group is calling on the MTA to make the IBX a fully driverless system.
As part of a new study, the research group partnered with NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, which reviewed hundreds of train systems across dozens of countries to see how many trains operate with two, one, or even zero train operators.
They found that fewer than 6.25% of systems still rely on two-person train operations (TPTO). And even among those few, places like Japan are already in the middle of modernization efforts to transition to one-person train operations (OPTO) and even zero-person train operations (ZPTO).
That’s where the idea came in: what if the IBX rolled onto the tracks without any operators at all, similar to JFK’s AirTrain? The study states that “Ideally, IBX will be fully automated when it opens so that it can operate the most robust service possible.”…