True story. BART the SF Bay Area subway, that’s been more or less a disaster since it started running in the early 70s was designed as a futuristic system run by computers (those lovely IBM mainframes of the late 60s!), and therein lay the problem. Critics accused the designers of neglecting the basic rules of designing a railway, such as providing sidetracks for disabled trains, and other flaws that have plagued this system for decades and cannot be easily corrected.
But anyway, the designers planned to have the trains run entirely by computers without an operator, and only freaked out realizing that passengers might freak out riding such trains. Today, the overpaid union operator that’s there in the lead car does very little except perhaps delay the closing of the train doors, the system is run by a computer. And driverless trains run at every major airport in the world.
My dad moved our family from the East Bay (Berserkely area) to the South Bay because of BART. He was riding it in the early days, and got tired of all the problems, so we just moved to Silicon Valley (where his job was).
Oh, yeah, I had forgotten about that controversy! I used to live in SF and was there when BART was rolled out.