Metro just approved a plan to make the Red Line work a bit more like the subways in Shanghai, Copenhagen, and Singapore, with driverless automatic trains and glass doors separating the platform from the tracks— though not for several years at least.
The WMATA board of directors voted today to endorse a plan to fully automate the Red Line and add platform screen doors as part of its capital improvement plan. The other lines would come next.
The changes wouldn’t be finished on the Red Line until 2032 at the earliest, and are contingent on federal funding. Platform screen doors would initially be added at 20 out of 27 stops on the Red Line, between Grosvenor-Strathmore and Silver Spring. No designs exist yet, but there was already plenty of speculation online about how the doors might look.
Ten people have already been hit by Metro trains this year. Seven of those incidents were fatal, and six of them were on the Red Line. Platform screen doors would “virtually eliminate track intrusions, suicides, trespassing incidents, and fatalities from persons struck by trains,” Metro says.
“The Red Line modernization is not about getting rid of employees,” WMATA general manager Randy Clarke said at Thursday’s board meeting. “We have an engineering and technology solution to prevent people from getting hit and killed by trains, and the trauma that puts on our frontline staff that has to respond to that, which is very serious.”
The leadership of ATU Local 689, the union that represents Metro train operators, said the money would be better spent on less glamorous repairs. The Metrorail system has more than $15 billion worth of backlogged and projected repairs, according to a report from 2025.
“Put simply, this is WMATA pursuing another shiny new project instead of focusing on its day to day capital budget needs,” the local’s president Raymond Jackson wrote in a letter to the board.
Union train operators aren’t opposed to the platform doors, but are concerned that the full-fledged automation of Metrorail will cost them their jobs.
“They see us as a bottleneck for future success,” train operator Christopher Terry said during public comments at the board meeting on Thursday.
As of summer 2025, all Metro trains already run via Automatic Train Operation (ATO), which controls the train’s acceleration and speed, but still requires a train operator to be in the cab. ATO allows trains to run faster and was part of the system’s original design, but had been discontinued in 2009 after officials suspected an automatic train control glitch contributed to the Red Line crash that killed eight passengers and the operator that year.
Clarke said WMATA was committed to abiding by a bill passed in the Maryland house that would give that state’s governor authority to withhold 35 percent of its Metro funding if the agency “does not mitigate staff reductions associated with rail automation.”
“Around the world, people do this totally differently,” Clarke said. “Sometimes there’s train attendants. Sometimes there’s operators. Sometimes they are security staff.”
It’s still an open question whether Metro can secure the $913 million it needs for this project.
Metro is hoping to get a major chunk of the money from the Federal Transit Administration. But Tom Webster, WMATA’s chief of planning, told the board that the feds haven’t given out much money for ambitious transit projects like these.
“This would be a first for this exact type of project,” Webster said.
Ike Allen covers politics, food, culture, and transportation in DC and writes the monthly Hidden Eats column for the magazine. He grew up in DC.
