Construction on Crossrail – London's £15 billion new railway – is well underway and from 2019, the railway will transport 200 million passengers a year.

The trains will be automated, but are not equipped with collision avoidance systems capable of detecting objects or persons on the track (they will have sensors to detect other trains). 

It is therefore essential that platform-edge doors are installed on all platforms served by Crossrail trains. Platform-edge doors ensure the safe separation of passengers from the danger of falling on to the railway track. These doors are already a fixture of the Jubilee Line extension on the London Underground, and are utilised in modern railways in at least 23 countries.

However, not all stations on the Crossrail network will have platform-edge doors installed, a decision that railway design experts have labelled "curious". Neither Custom House or Abbey Wood, stations currently under construction, will have these doors installed, even though the cost to outfit a station with these doors is estimated by Transport for London to cost less than £800,000.

Platform-edge doors do not only prevent passengers from falling onto railway tracks. They have important functions in preventing the spread of fire. In Taipei, a simulated fire in a station with platform-edge doors installed restricted the fire from reaching the tunnel, enabling the situation to be controlled in under 6 minutes (a similar incident in the Baku Metro, which did not have platform-edge doors, killed 337 people in 1995). In addition, trains can travel faster and maintain tighter schedules when operators can be certain there are no intruders on the tracks. The doors also make it cheaper to climatise railway stations, as only platforms - and not tunnels - need be air conditioned.

There would be complexities associated with introducing platform-edge doors intro existing platforms on the London Underground. But there is no compelling reason why a new railway station built in London, projected to see 100,000 commuters a day, should not be future-proofed and built with platform-edge doors.

It is unthinkable, in the 21st century, that a driverless railway could be built in a city as densely populated as London without platform-edge doors installed on every railway platform. Such a decision poses an unacceptable risk to human life and must be changed.