Not too long ago, I walked across the fly-over section of Vancouver BC’s West Georgia Street. My destination was a Spanish restaurant on Main Street called Bodega on Main—its food is respectable and its table covers ugly, in a charming way. Twenty minutes before, I had been in a hotel room with a view of the library designed by the great uncle of the Safdie brothers (Uncut Gems, Good Time), architect Moshe Safdie. Before crossing the overpass, which took about 15 minutes, I saw nine trains going to and from the downtown area. This is the kind of frequency that changes the character of a city’s transit system. “More is different,” the American physicist P.W. Anderson maintained in a brief but influential 1972 paper. Meaning, two systems with the same elements are radically different if one has a much larger number of those elements. This is the basis of emergency theory. Seattle’s light rail system is not at all like the one in Vancouver, the SkyTrain. Here, platform-waiting is hard to avoid; there, a train has either just left or is about to come. 

The SkyTrain is also fully automated. And this, it turns out, is the substance of this post: Automation isn’t always a bad thing. 

What we’ve learned since Link opened in 2009 is that trains need to be elevated or in the ground. That’s the only way to avoid the state-supported stupidity of cars. And if our system, which still has only one line, was built in this rational way, there would be no bad encounters with street-level traffic and no need for drivers. The trains could do the job by themselves.

But what does it mean for automation to be an obviously bad thing for workers in general but a good thing for public use? Can we learn from this clear functional difference? Self-acting machines that keep labor costs down and wage earners disciplined are ontologically not the same as those that, without a question, are optimal in the wider social (and therefore democratic) sense. An ontological distinction also exists between the fantasy of self-driving cars and the reality of automated trains.    

Though the dream of fully automating the automobile is still far from realization (“GM’s Reuss Hopes Cruise Will Regain Trust In ‘Four To Five’ Years”), capitalists, with financial and political encouragement from the state, have poured history-making resources into them. But people robots are already here. Indeed, fully automated trains have been with us in a meaningful way since the 1980s. (Seattle also has an excellent and punctual automated line, but it is short and only serves the SeaTac International Airport.) And what will self-driving cars never become? As safe and effective as the SkyTrain. These people-moving machines arrive on time, are fast, and rarely make mistakes.

Also, the anxiety caused by robots that only concentrate wealth in the hands of a few property owners is absent when it comes to robots that serve, in the main, those with little to no property. We do not fear that automated trains will take over the world or have some secret agenda nefariously growing and glowing in their circuitry. We trust these robots. They are our comrades. Can this feeling of confidence be attributed to what some theorize will be the end of capitalism and the next level of economic reality, fully automated luxury communism? (I will leave that question for another post.) 

What does all of this mean? What am I trying to get at? The answer might be partially found in this key passage in Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking A Cyborg Manifesto:

The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention [formal] state socialism. But illegitimate offsprings are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.

True that. But most of the machines in the market system can never be anything else than faithful to their origins. The automobile is obviously such a machine (self-driving or not). Why? Because it has too much fantasy in it to be useful (or disenchanted) in the widest possible sense. This is why traffic engineering can never be, in essence, a technical matter. It can only be cultural, like conducting a Sunday service or refereeing a Monday night football match. This is why AI or other smart technologies are condemned to continue car culture as it is: traffic, more traffic, endless traffic. Technical solutions, as defined by the AI researcher Dr. Joy Buolamwini in her book Unmasking AI, will never reach and penetrate the phantasmagoria of a Ford F-150. When it comes to this and other massive automobiles, prayers and spells are just as effective as computer programs and processing systems. A train, however, is accessible to the social world, which is not the same as the cultural one. It is, for the masters of our dominant culture (capitalism), the worst kind of machine because it’s not only unfaithful to its origins but its problems and challenges are mostly technical.

I think about this every time I’m on Vancouver’s SkyTrain or SeaTac’s SEA Underground or JFK’s AirTrain.

Dr. Joy Buolamwini will discuss her book with Charles Mudede at Town Hall on Sunday, February 18.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

15 replies on “We Would Love Sound Transit’s Link More If It Were Automated”

  1. “What does all of this mean? What am I trying to get at?”

    Pro tip: If you have to raise this sort of rhetorical question with your audience, your writing would almost certainly benefit some organizational changes and further editing.

  2. Automation :

    The United States didn’t invent railroad trains ( but they did perfect them, as much as was possible using 19th century technology ).

    Japan used that same technology, the SAME EXACT technology, and invented Bullet Trains. Faster, safer, quieter, cleaner, more frequent, and they run a profit ( which Amtrak has never done ). Only, Japan did it three-quarters-of-a-century-ago.

    The United States didn’t invent urban rail mass transit. There are even places here in this country where it works, and works well, using century-and-a-half-old technology.

    Canada took that same technology, that SAME EXACT technology, and built their Sky-Train system. Fast, frequent, efficient, dependable. Only, they did it so long ago, Reagan was in the White House. You can read about him in your history books.

    France has 800 TGV trains PER DAY. They’re popular because they’re fast, they’re frequent, they’re dependable, and they’re cheaper than driving. Oh by the way, France has less population density than Ohio or New Jersey, or lots of this country. About the same as Pennsylvania or Florida, a little more than California. Most of the United States has no passenger trains, or if they do, they only run 3 times a week.

    Are you old enough to remember when the United States used to be considered a “high-tech country” ?

  3. Well, considering the record on the “automated stairs” at ST stations, I’m not so sure…

    Also, the subway system at Sea-Tac has been around since 1973.

  4. “What does all of this mean? What am I trying to get at?”

    ‘How hard must I twist facts and logic to agree how automation is always bad bad, no good, very bad from a Marxist perspective, but incredibly awesomely totally purely good when it delivers a convenience which I happen personally to want?’

  5. The problem is the above grade cars, so automated trains only work if the train gets a tunnel OR all the cars are automated and coordinated. Kind of a bigger lift.

  6. Interesting, we were just chatting about this on the Seattle Transit Blog. I wouldn’t necessarily say it is “too late”. Buses are already being automated (https://humantransit.org/2023/09/a-next-step-for-autonomous-buses.html). Automating trains down Rainier Valley is quite reasonable. It will take some effort and money. The problem is, Seattle Transit doesn’t care. Increasing frequency is not a priority.

    It is worth noting that there are plenty of transit systems with very high frequency that aren’t automated. Toronto, for example. The two main lines run every two to three minutes, all day long. The key is to have an urban system. We do not. We have a system that largely fucks over the city in its zest to serve distant suburbs. We could definitely save money with automation, but that doesn’t mean the trains would run frequently down Rainier Valley. We just didn’t build that kind of system.

    What makes SkyTrain special is not the automation. Nor is it that it serves the key urban areas — that is actually normal (we are the weird ones). What is special is how they manage to do both while doing an excellent job of integrating the bus system. The buses and trains work very well together, and lots of people take both (they ride the buses more than the trains). Instead of trying to mimic one of the best new systems on the West Coast, we just copied all of the crappy systems (BART, DART, RTD, etc.).

  7. I was Promised

    Teleportation or worse

    case tubalpneumatic transpo

    but Capitalism stole my Lamborghini

    & replaced it with a thumb & an empty gas can

    El trumpfster’ll have the trains

    running On time. we can

    Leave it up to

    him

    it’ll be Perfect.

    practice saying that.

  8. AgentSmith2 dear, you are correct that Amtrak has never made a profit. But neither did the streamliners of the “golden age” of travel. They were heavily subsidized by the United State Postal Service. When USPS opted to go to airplanes for mail transport, those subsidies dried up, and the private rall lines whined that they needed to be relieved of the “burden” of operating passenger trains. That’s how we got the National Rail Passenger Corporation (aka Amtrak), which has been micro-managed since day one, further hobbling its potential to make any profit.

    At about the same time Amtrak came about, the government was handed the absolute disaster of the New York Central/Pennsylvania Railroad merger, which threatened to collapse the entire NE corridor (it was mostly freight traffic, thanks to Amtrak, but they had some vital commuter lines as well).

    The government reorganized it into Conrail, and managed to get it to turn a profit – at which point the Republicans made sure to sell it off to their cronies

  9. @ al:

    harvesting

    the Citizenry

    for Maximimum

    Profiteering is as

    American as apple pie

    tumordogs and ‘republicans.’

    which is why

    it’s no surprise

    they’ve captured

    ‘our’ supreme court

    & buying lawmakers is

    Legal af — If you can Afford it.

  11. It’s a good bet that France, Japan, etc. don’t tolerate smoking fentanal, the mentally ill abusing fellow passengers, homeless druggies, etc. on their trains (but then again, their a different sort of society). We’re going down the drain!

  12. Soy dear, it is our solemn duty to accept less services and a degraded society so that the rich don’t have to pay their share of taxes.

  14. I mostly agree with Charles and this is no exception. I’m tired of looking around at the rest of the so called 1st world nations and coming up short. Light rail here in Seattle is a lightweight solution for a city that can’t get out of its own way. Tiresome.

  15. Glad to have you back AgentSmith2, we posted together successfully on the P-I comment board back in the day, and you provided another thought-provoking insight here.

    Let us know if you figure out that D.B. Cooper mystery.

    It is a mistake to fully automate transportations systems.

    Better to have a human on board in case things go haywire and someone needs to hit the brakes.

    Ask the blessed survivors of self-driving vehicle accidents where the navigation system went bonkers, and the vehicle interacted with a speeding semi or innocent pedestrian.

    Also Mr. Mudede, who as a Marxist is certainly sensitive to the needs of the proletarian, would like to see good-paying jobs like transit drivers be preserved, automated navigation notwithstanding.

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