Originally Posted by
legalalien
I'd also be interested in a "semi-official" reply from
ords but my personal view is that after a very long testing phase, they are still not convinced of the system's reliability. So, if/when ATS has to be shut down for whatever reason, it is easier to direct passengers to already-running busses than to roll bus operation out.
Does seem wasteful, though, both financially and environmentally.
Having been stuck with light and heat off on the ATS this for 15+ minutes or so morning (a couple hundred yards outbound of the abandoned-looking station after the MMF towards T5 --
I am not convinced of the system's reliability. The delay message repeating every 30 seconds or so (that then turned into two minutes of "Th...the...th....the...th..." while the cars rebooted when power was restored) doesn't really instill confidence and I think my car was going to self-evacuate if we had been stuck much longer. The non-automated "don't self evacuate" announcement, aside from having a ton of background noise making it a little hard to understand, mentioned using the intercom --- I didn't go searching for one but it wasn't immediately obvious unlike the door open handles. It also didn't provide any useful information, e.g. cause or expected duration of delay.
Granted that's only one of 6 rides in the past month but some of the less frequent travelers amongst us were particularly spooked.