While Paris Sleeps; The engineers at the Metro have started an ambitious project to lead the world into an automated future.(Regie Autonome des Transports Parisiens, driverless metro rail service)

Byline: Benjamin Sutherland

Even in a country that's long prided itself on its trains, the Paris Metro stands out. It's fast, easy to navigate, clean, inexpensive and, with 16 lines serving 297 stations, remarkably dense--leading many transport experts to consider it the world's premier metro. Since the first few lines entered service at the turn of the 20th century, the Metro has grown into a 218-kilometer network that carries 1.36 billion passengers a year. A train sweeps through the 25 stations of Ligne 1, the city's busiest, every 105 seconds. Paris's Metro authority, the RATP, is apparently not satisfied. Last summer it began an ambitious effort to slice 20 seconds off train headway time and increase rolling speed. It plans to do it by automating the entire line--eliminating drivers and replacing them with computers.

Paris is not the first city to install a driverless metro line--30 or so cities, such as Ankara, Copenhagen and Vancouver, already have automated lines, and 20 more are under construction. But these lines were built from scratch. What makes the Paris Metro's effort so extraordinary is that it's planning on renovating the line's aged infrastructure--replacing switches and control networks and so forth--without so much as a single day of downtime. Engineering work must be limited to four hours each night when the Metro is closed. "This is a world first," says Yves Ramette, the RATP's head of rolling stock and leader of the conversion. The $150 million project, to be finished in 2010, is expected to boost passenger capacity by a third, cut operating costs by a third, and pay for itself in 10 years.

The RATP and its industrial partners are in a lead position for contracts to automate metro networks worldwide. Paris engineers are acquiring expertise in the art of replacing old cables, computerizing tracks with sensors that exchange data with the trains they carry, reinforcing rails to handle higher speeds, installing new signal equipment and tunnel cameras, and building operation-control rooms. This know-how is already generating consulting fees from 10 or so other metropolitan authorities. Late last year, the RATP and its engineering firms signed agreements to build and operate automated metro lines in Rome and Sao Paulo, which would be Latin America's first driverless line. ...