When the L train pulls into the Canarsie station Sunday at 12:37 a.m. it will be missing one thing: its conductor.

New York City Transit is scheduled to begin the next phase of a transition toward greater automation of the subway system when it removes all conductors from the L line on weekends and after midnight starting at the end of this weekend. Transit officials plan to remove all the conductors from the line throughout the week’s schedule perhaps as early as November.

Transit officials have had what they call OPTO, for One Person Train Operation, since 1996 on the subway system’s six shuttle lines, including the shuttle from Grand Central Terminal to Times Square, and the G line on weekends. The L trains, however, are 180 feet longer than those trains and have eight cars, which can hold total as many as 1,000 passengers.

The 71 conductors who work on the L line are not being laid off. A hiring freeze in effect in recent years will allow some L conductors to fill vacancies at other lines, while others will serve as platform conductors, directing rush-hour commuters at some of the system’s busiest stations.

Transit officials justified the move as a cost-cutting measure, saying it would eventually reap $4.6 million in savings from not replacing conductors lost to attrition, a New York City Transit spokesman, Charles Seaton, said.

Critics of the plan have said removing the conductors would put passengers in harm’s way. As a reason to delay the removal of conductors, they have cited a botched drill in April that simulated the evacuation of an L train with only one transit worker. During the drill a transit worker mistakenly opened the doors into a theoretically smoke-filled subway track, a potentially fatal error in a real emergency.

“For them to plunge into OPTO in the absence of having conducted at least – at least – one successful drill is beyond belief,” the chairman of the City Council’s Committee on Transportation, John Liu, a Democrat of Flushing, told The New York Sun. “I don’t want to tell the MTA in the coming months ‘I told you so,’ because that would have meant a tragedy.”

At a hearing last month on the issue, a director at New York City Transit’s office of system safety said the drill was meant only to give Fire Department and other emergency workers an opportunity to practice responding to subway evacuations.

Other subway systems in Chicago, Cleveland, and Philadelphia are converting their trains to be operated by one person instead of two, the safety official, Kenneth Brown, said. In Europe, the London Underground and the Paris Metro have had some trains operated by one person since the 1980s, he said.

“Our direct experience with OPTO thus far has shown it is at least as safe as two-person operations, if not safer, due to the elimination of the coordination between two crew members,” Mr. Brown said.

Increased automation, though, has worried subway riders, especially after a woman was reported to have been raped last week on a Queens subway platform.

“The subway line is more dangerous at night,” one rider, Melissa Gomez, 27, said as she rode the L yesterday with her two children. “Not having a conductor working at night doubles the danger, especially for someone who travels alone.”

For conductors on the L, the move is more an issue of inconvenience. Some conductors who live close to the L line said it will be an issue of longer commuting distances. A conductor since 1983, Mustafa Muslim, has enjoyed the proximity of work to his home in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Though he will not be affected immediately, since he works the day shift, plans to remove all conductors will eventually affect him as well.

Rather than expressing worry for his future, though, he said he feared for the safety of passengers and predicted that before he would be assigned elsewhere, New York City Transit would return conductors to the L.

“They’ll take conductors offline, then they’ll have so many lawsuits they’ll be back in a month,” the conductor said.