The headline is vague, but this is about increasing the requirements to two operators per train.
It’s a make-work bill designed to maximize the number of operators on the payroll. As the article explains, the justifications don’t really add up.
> This is revealed in the last sentence, claiming that OTPO would cause “further loss of jobs to NYC.” This bill is not about safety, but rather an unfunded program designed to protect one single job type from eventual obsolescence.
Single operator has proven to be completely fine around the world. Some are starting to move to zero operator. Bills like this are designed to keep the number of jobs high. Given the expense, it inevitably comes at a cost of reductions in service elsewhere. There is no free money.
Make-work is the stupidest idea. If we want people to have an income why don't we just give it to them rather than making them do work that is useless (or sometimes harmful, see coal) to the public?
> There is no free money.
When you are talking about the MTA budget no. But at the higher government levels there often is. Lots of lower-income people's income ends up right back in the economy or reduces other costs (like healthcare of people on government health plans). Plus it oven gives people the resources (time and money) to get a job that is valuable to society. (From things like going to a education course to something like being able to have a shower before your interview and a phone to receive job offers on.) There are of course "losses" like money exiting the country or consumption of raw resources (which is likely going to happen whether they have a useless job or are just given some form of welfare) but it isn't nearly as expensive as the critics like to pretend it is.
I don't know, it got the US out of the Great Depression.
Work programs can be great, if you're doing valuable work that helps the public and strengthens your nation. The US, to this day, has the largest public work program - the military. If you think about what the military actually is, it's a work program.
New york has terrible infrastructure, I doubt there's level boarding so disabled people can get on without assistance.
In many countries one person operation can work on metro systems, but NY is probably about 50 years of investment behind in infrastructure before that's a good idea.
Every NYC subway station has had level boarding forever since they were originally built. There can be some horizontal gaps for sure, which they should fix, but it's generally vertically level within the change in diameter of wheels over their lifetime. And if there are gaps, conductors are not helping anyone get on anyways.
Yep I can’t stand this disingenuous behavior. Really the trains should even be automated at this point. Chicago constantly has staffing issues so their service gets worse and worse and yet they insist on staying in the past.
When Chicago got rid of the conductors, trains got slower and less reliable. If you've ever had to wait on the train while the operator has to come out of the cab to help a disabled person, respond to a door fault or call button, you've been delayed by one man train operation.
In fact every time the train stops and there's a noticable pause before the door opens, that is caused by the operator having to move from the driving controls to the door controls.
Same. The only time the operator leaves the cabin where I live is when they're switching which end of the train they're driving from or they're taking the train out of service at the last stop. There's almost no other reason for them to ever do so.
We haven't had a derailment here since 2009 where a train left the track by about a foot or so. It could happen, but in the course of normal business operations, evacuations are not a regular event here pulling operators out of their cabins. More likely is a door breaks (or rather someone breaks a door) and they have to seal it manually to keep the train moving, but I only see that happen on the older >20 years old stock and pretty much never on the newer stock.
I’ve not had any of that on the London Underground which hasn’t had a second operator for 25 years. No delays in DOO above trains - at least not the kind that a separate guard would solve.
The major impact is at stations without level boarding where assistance which should be from the platform doesn’t arrive.
One could simply just buy trains that have door controls and driving controls in the same ergonomic layout. Other places have OPTO without these problems.
AirTrain, which carries passengers between JFK terminals and a couple of miles to the Jamaica train station, runs completely without operators, with no room allocated for an operator, you can peer through the windshield forward. It works quite well.
But it was built this way, there were no operators to lay off, and no unions to bargain with.
Crazy idea here. Why don’t we just have the best of both worlds?
We want trains to operate more reliably, and be computer operated with just one or zero humans on board. OK, let’s do that.
MTA employees don’t want to lose their livelihoods. That’s reasonable. I’m perfectly happy to pay them their existing salary and benefits to sit at home and do nothing. We won’t hire anyone new, and the job will eventually disappear. In the meantime, anyone who already has that job, congrats. Early retirement, paid in full. Enjoy the beach. We were going to spend that money on your salary anyway, so what does it matter? There are worse things to spend taxpayer money on.
If you don't hire anyone new, the MTA union gradually loses power. That's a big no-no in the eyes of the union. Make-work bills aren't about saving jobs, but about saving power.
Alright, then add station attendant jobs. People complain about the MTA feeling unsafe, have some guys dressed up in train uniforms hang around the station, able to answer questions or deescalate any commotion.
You're not taking into account two factors: union bosses don't like it because it means their fiefs shrink. Politicians/parties don't like it because it denies them a captive voting bloc. They'd actually have to do stuff like walking the length of Manhattan to get elected, rather than securing the major voting blocs by making a few backroom deals with the top unions/business leaders.
Not at all. In local politics, government employee unions and their family members get their way many times because those are the people who show up to vote, including in the primaries.
I’d much rather see these people being employed at the service level.
For example when automatic checkout machines came I thought “great, more people in the aisles that I can ask stuff”. Of course that never happened so now the reality is a queue of people waiting for a machine while three are blocked because nobody is there to help people.
Yes, nothing is worse than being forced to say "hi, how are you". I mean, that's, like, 5 seconds out of my 24 hour day. That's unacceptable.
For a long time I thought less socialization is better, because I can get things done faster. Turns out, no I can't, because actually I suck at most things. A teenager is faster at bagging than me. I suck at bagging, and that job pays 15 dollars an hour.
And also, walking around everywhere with headphones on is no fun. It's just kind of... isolating and cold. All those tiny interactions add up to making you feel like a real person living a real life.
There were shorter queues for a while. Now they aren’t.
When they started most shops (I live in France) had both standard and automatic checkout. And about three people to deal with stuck machines (mostly scale issues, anti theft tag removal, and damaged barcodes).
Now most smaller supermarkets only have the automatic queue and one person dealing with the trouble. This means that all people who really can’t use the automatic machines (kids, elderly, people doing large groceries) have to use them and the queue is constantly clogged.
It was better for a little while, now it’s strictly worse.
You are out of your mind. Driving a bus in NYC is one of the most difficult jobs imaginable. Maybe someone who drives a big tractor trailer would be more prepared to do it, but someone who has only driven average cars will need extensive training and practice before they can be entrusted with the lives of real passengers on the streets of NYC in all traffic and weather conditions.
Not to mention, bus drivers have to do a lot more than just drive. It’s several jobs in one. Not only do they have to do the driving they also have to do customer service, fare collection, and deal with problematic passengers.
All hail the mighty bus driver. In a just society they would swap salaries with the CEOs.
In a sense, you are arguing in favor of a Fifth Amendment "taking", because the company (or government) loses money by being forced to pay people to do nothing.
No small business would tolerate being required to pay people to stay home, so why should taxpayers?
Whenever I take the train at night I always sit in the front car because that's where the operator is and it's safer. Having trains with no MTA emlpoyees at all is not a way to have a safe and reliable transit system.
Why not pay someone specifically as a guard if that’s the aim? That way they can focus on security instead of having to operate the doors too. And they can handle unsafe situations.
Also NYC door operators are in their own cabin so they cannot really see the people anyways. They don’t have the training to do anything about an incident
Typically on the U.K., if a service is rowdy and feels unsafe the guard will hide in their cabin and never emerge to do a ticket check.
In other words a no difference in personal safety between a driver only or driver and guard operation.
I’m not aware of any evidence of reduced safety in any category after introducing DOO, and if there as I suspect unions would be screaming from the hills. The only measurable impact I’ve seen is on accessibility (which doesnt mean that’s not a consideration)
That totally flew over my head, sorry! Violence in the train didn't even occur to me while reading the comment, I thought they meant something on the lines of "the driver will have better visibility when opening/closing the doors on the front train so it's safer to go there so they cannot accidentally close them on me" or something similar. Now of course they meant there's less chance of violent behavior near the train driver, and the comment makes a lot more sense for me now.
Note: I do take the train daily, just I live in Tokyo
American cities are less safe, but the NYC subway is quite safe. Train operators will never leave their cabin no matter what (part of the rules of the job), and so do not enhance the safety at all.
That is a crazy idea, not because it's unique but because we already did that and "the definition of crazy is doing the same thing again and expecting a different result" (clearly idempotence was something the universe protected during this era of pithy saying making). And as usual HN has the teenage angst responses of "THEY don't want to give up THEIR power" and shit like that. Christ.
Anyway, the dockworkers were already paid off in 1977 because containerization obviated most of their jobs. So the deal we gave them was "You get paid whether you work or not". The problem with paying people when they don't work is that they can then work and use their extra money to extort you even more. Which is exactly what they did this last year. That's right, half of the striking guys weren't guys who'd be working if there wasn't a strike.
If you want to create various mobs that eat you alive while a bunch of useful idiots parrot some platitudes about unions, you should pay the unions even more money for less work.
Kipling wrote a poem here that is illustrative for all these guys who think they have "one crazy idea that solves everything" that is always this same old idea. I shall give you two lines to meditate on:
Meanwhile in more civilized places we have trains with zero staff on board, just remote monitoring (and trains which emergency stop if they lose contact with the control centre).
DLR has a passenger assistant who can “drive” the train in some circumstances if required (reports of trespassing on track) but is not for driving and certainly doesn’t always happen.
Only completely unstaffed vehicles in the U.K. that I can think of are short people movers like the ones at airports. Many tube lines can be driven completely automated, the drivers job on lines like the central is basically “push go, hold deadman’s switch, push door close” and repeat, but they aren’t
In other countries on lines which are staffers vehicles there are typically far more platform based staff.
AFAIK the DLR has always been staffed, there’s never been a period where it was truely driverless.
However, as it was designed for automatic train operation from the start, it is effectively “guard (US: conductor) only operation” instead of “driver only operation”, and doesn’t have a traditional drivers cab.
From 1962 to 1964, the Times Square - Grand Central shuttle was fully automated.
There was still a "motorman", for union reasons, who did not ride in the cab.[1]
Worked fine, but an unrelated station fire damaged the equipment, and the automatic system was not rebuilt.
That's the simplest possible case - a train on a dedicated track, going back and forth between two stations. It's a 90 second trip.
That trip is still being driven manually today. It takes two motormen, one at each end of the train, because one person going from one end of the train to the other through the crowd would slow the 90-second operation way down. It's amazing that it's not automated today.
On the Ethan Allen Express (Amtrak) I took this week, the boarding steps to the cars had to be manually deployed by train staff, along with a little step stool. When I got on, there were two people doing this, so only two train cars were boardable.
I think non-Americans underestimate our ability to not automate things that can clearly be automated through some combination of of inertia, union power, and sheer incompetence.
It’s because Amtrak basically doesn’t matter. What’s amazing about this story is the ability of these make-work policies to survive in one of the most demanding urban transport systems. NYC baby.
One reason is that it's already so expensive to operate a regular train, that the expense of having one employee (or even two) isn't as significant compared to a individual transportation. Paying the taxi driver is a significant part of the cost of a taxi trip. Paying the train operator isn't a significant part of the cost a train ride.
Edit: The article claims the opposite, and maybe that's true in NYC? I did find a breakdown of costs in Germany, for a municipal light rail service: operating the train is 1860 EUR per journey overall, paying the people operating the train (one operator, possibly one conductor) is 350 EUR of that. That ratio is smaller than I would've guessed, but it's not a majority.
It depends on whether you calculate it as including the amortized fixed costs (e.g. the cost of building the tunnels) or the incremental cost (what does it cost to have one additional passenger). If it's the first one then the cost is way higher, but then you'd have to do the same thing in the other case and include the cost of building roads etc.
However, fixed costs are better funded by general taxes than by usage fees because otherwise you pay a huge fixed cost to build something with a low incremental usage cost and then under-utilize it because recovering the sunk cost through fares causes high fares which deters uses whose value exceeds the incremental cost.
Meanwhile human labor is a significant proportion of the incremental cost, when you have humans doing things per-trip that could reasonably be automated.
There are already many autonomous trains operating all over the world. They have centralised control centers to monitor them, and then maintenance crews that can travel to work on any malfunctions or breakdowns.
This is already happening in Paris, London, Copenhagen, Singapore, Tokyo, and many more places. They all still have staff that move around the network to work on things not related to driving the train though.
So, I think you're right in pointing out that they still need many people constantly monitoring and working on the trains. But they don't need a driver per train any more, and they especially don't need two drivers per train.
The site's headline is ambiguous. At first I wondered if it was some weirdly premature bill against individualized automated travel-pods.
Instead, it's about requiring at least one "conductor" (separate from a driver) to be on every train. I feel the reasonableness of this varies depending on the route and how easily the driver can summon assistance without abandoning their post.
After 20 years of riding, I can assure you that no conductor on an MTA subway train is coming to save you if anything goes down, whether there are 0, 1, 2 or 10 of them on every train.
The "conductor" could be in a compartment completely separate from the passengers right? This doesn't sound anything like a NJ Transit or a Caltrain conductor.
Are you claiming that trains running outside cities are less suitable for one person operation?
There is no evidence of that, plenty of trains around the world run both inside and outside cities with a single operator.
There is also no evidence of a city being a "more predictable environment". Deaths are roughly equivalent; in the city it's people jumping on tracks intentionally, outside its drivers getting stuck on crossings.
A subway or city train stops every few minutes. This means that if somebody gets hurt, has a stroke, assaults somebody, starts shooting up… there is almost immediately a way to board more staff and handle the situation.
On a train with hours and tens or hundreds of kilometers between stops this is much less the case.
I mean things like: beyond city scale, you can't assume all the technology has been tested together, you can't assume you actually know where other trains are, etc.
The trains ride on a track. The tracks have sensors. The sensor positions are known. Now you know where all of the trains are.
GPS satellites could drop out of the sky and you’d still know where the trains are.
More predictable maybe, but also way more intensive (only 30-60 seconds between trains, vs rural freight where many lines only see one or two trains per DAY, or even per week.
Are there are metro systems that run trains 30 seconds apart? I think the fastest is around 90 seconds.
Rarely used freight lines (aka branch lines) would never be automated, that wouldn't make sense. And some mainlines (I live near one) see as many as 4 100-car freight trains per hour. Those will never be less than one-man operation either, not least because at-grade crossings are everywhere.
The problem is that they run close enough together that any failures rapidly cascade until suddenly your whole network is a half hour late as it grinds to a halt...
It took thirty years for railroads to overcome union opposition and remove the caboose on trains. That's because union rules specified a full time employee in the caboose.
It seems due to the way NY machine politics works, this was passed as a "freebee" to the union without considering the broader societal impact.
There are plenty of ways to improve productivity without firing train operators — simplest way is running more service in the existing network, and also expanding the network.
This evidently wasn't disgussed — and indeed the bill lies saying there is no fiscal impact. Hopefully Governor Hochul refuses to sign it.
> Long haul freight trains however, should absolutely be exempt.
We will see automated long haul freight trains eventually, as long as their is pressure to up safety requirements (human operators being the weakest link in that).
IIRC we had a train get loose without operators in Western Australia and they just remotely derailed it, like it was nothing. Remote control would have been preferable, the incident demonstrated to me that the remote operators have the steel in their spine to destroy the companies money rather than risk human life.
I’m surprised to read that this is such a bad practice. Trains here in the Netherlands seem to always have two operators. I got the same impression of German trains.
Mont (if not allmost all) S-Bahn trains in Germany only have one staff member. The space for wheelchairs is directly behind the drivers cabin and the few times I've seen a ramp being deployed, it took the driver 1-2 minutes (Usually the automatically deployed gap filler is good enough). A large portion (I'd guess somewhere around 20-40%) of regional trains are also only staffed with the driver. The others do have an additional staff member, but they're almost always not safety relevant and only perform ticket checks, answer questions and help with ramp deployment.
The only times I've seen more than the driver on trams/Stadtbahns/metros, they checked tickets. This also happens surprisingly rarely.
I have never seen a conductor on a metro/subway system in Europe. Mainline trains often have one, but not always. I've ridden trains on small branch lines in Germany which were operated by a driver only.
> Labor costs are by far the single greatest expense in transit operations. This bill unnecessarily inflates these costs, ultimately shifting the burden onto riders through potential fare hikes or reducing the capacity for much-needed service improvements.
Couldn't they go ahead and put in automation for all the skilled work that the required second person would do if there were no automation, but make it so at each stop someone has to press a button to tell the automation to start?
They could then use minimum wage employees for the second person position. Would that be cheap enough to not be a significant burden?
They already do this on lines with upgraded CBTC signaling. The train runs in ATO (Automatic Train Operation) in which the driver just pushes the start button at each station. So they tried to combine the driver and conductor into one position, but the union fought back and stopped it.
Also, they can't use minimum wage employees for the driver who just pushes a button because the union would throw a fit and might go on strike.
Compared to the budget of running the trains themselves this seems like a drop in the bucket even if it is unnecessary so not really a big deal and people gotta eat. That said I think the more obvious solution to wanting or needing "busy work" with no actual purpose is instead UBI rather than requiring someone to stand around doing nothing 99.9% of the day to survive.
A CONDUCTOR SHALL BE REQUIRED ON ANY SUBWAY OR TRAIN OPERATED BY THE AUTHORITY WHENEVER THE SUBWAY OR TRAIN HAS MORE THAN TWO CARS ATTACHED TO THE ENGINE THEREOF”
- There's only one 2-car line, the Franklin Ave. Shuttle
- That line is converting to have 3-car trains.
So to begin with, the set of small enough trains is the tiniest portion of everything the subway does, not even covering all the small "shuttle" lines. And then even that tiny exception is set to end. Big difference between "applies to the busier routes" and "applies to essentially all the routes."
The article counts all the off peak and overnight trains, including shuttles. Even out of all of that, only the Franklin Shuttle is 2 cars and will soon be switching to 3 cars.
Could you elaborate on accessibility? NYC conductors and operators on the subway don't help passengers get onto and off of the train. (Platforms are roughly level with trains.)
For longer trains you could make that case, though it should be the agency that makes that call, not politicians that don't have the information to make technical safety calls. Systems across the world don't seem to have issues here though. In any case, there's no world where one employee is enough for emergencies in two cars, but not enough in three, while two employees are sufficient in a train with ten cars.
How? The state assembly vote was an unanimous "yay". In the senate, only two state senators voted against, but they were actually from "upstate". Blaming "upstate folks making decisions for New York" makes no sense here.
"I don't think the company[1] is corrupt. The company's job is to advocate for its shareholders. The legislators' job is to say "no, you're asking for too much"."
[1] take your pick of Comcast, Boeing, or United Health
> Other countries' unions are much more open minded about automation.
Other countries have social services outside of "fuck you, go die".
The US sucks major ass to be a working person, period. Your job is everything. If you lose your job, you can lose it all. Most people are one or two bad weeks away from being homeless here.
Yes, the stakes are higher. My job isn't just a job - it's my health insurance, it's the roof over my head, it's the food on my table, it's my reputation.
Want people to be less hostile to automation? Great, start by making automation less hostile to them. When automation threatens your actual life, people are going to oppose it. At the end of the day, we're animals. When a Gazelle sees a Lion, they run.
You're right. The real problem is that the MTA union is a big voting and donation bloc that selects the people they negotiate against. The real solution is to do away with the MTA union. An organization founded on corruption doing its intended purpose isn't any less corrupt.
And as someone living in the top of New York, I'm ABSOLUTELY sick and tired of city folks making some of the absolute stupidest decisions for the rest of New York, but we all have to eat the same shit sandwich, so: eat up, buddy!
So why don't y'all split the state up? NYC in one corner, the rest of NY on the other.
Then upstate folk will get real political representation in Albany, and NYC will send two interesting senators to DC. As much as I disagree with AOC I'd love for her to become a senator.
Easier said than done, as it needs consent of the state legislature and the us congress. The last time a state was split off like this was West Virginia exiting Virginia in 1863, while Virginia had seceded.
First step the state has to want to split, though. And I guarantee you that the red capitols (most of them) are game.
That leaves a small hurdle of getting a couple of purple states. Perhaps a great compromise is reached - NY ex-NYC merges with PA ex-Philly and Philly joins NYC.
I completely agree with your sentiment, but the same goes the other way. I grew up in Upstate NY and people were always annoyed by the city making decisions for upstate.
I totally agree with the concept you're talking about though. Especially here - this feels like it should be a municipality's decision.
Planes manage to be economically viable with two pilots. Arguably modern planes are so automated only one is needed. Yet we don't see such hand wringing about that. The labour cost of train operations is so relatively small it's a non-issue.
Planes manage to be economically viable with two pilots because tickets cost on the order of 100 times more than the subway fare and aren't expected to be used by ordinary people for daily commutes, and they also travel 30,000 feet in the air so if there's trouble it can be more dangerous and complicated than something that operates on rails on the ground.
And even then the need for two pilots is pretty questionable and is primarily sustained for precisely the same questionable reason, i.e. lobbying by pilot unions.
>I'm not sure guaranteed jobs should be rejected in this case.
1. as an actual jobs policy it's terrible. It brings an absolute minuscule amount of jobs, and puts the burden on the part of the economy that can least afford it (ie. underfunded transit system). If you want to legislate some jobs into existence, do something like forcing social media companies to hire local content moderators, or hiring elevator attendants.
2. "universal jobs" policy is terrible in general. For one, it doesn't help the disabled or their caretakers. UBI doesn't do a perfect job here either (eg. a special needs kid probably would need way more money than the standard UBI), but at least the disabled person/caretaker doesn't need to waste time on job. For the able-bodied, a "universal jobs" policy isn't great either. If their labor is actually worth something, then they can probably find gainful employment in the private sector. If they can't (eg. they're mentally disabled), then making them to make-work like digging ditches and filling them back again as a condition of getting financial assistance is humiliating and cruel.
This has nothing to do a with a universal job guarantee like your article.
It only protects one very specific job and the people qualified to do it. Those people are also protective about letting newcomers become trained to have those jobs. They don’t want you or anyone else to be able to go get that job, they want it protected for themselves.
Such is the nature of narrow job protection bills like these.
The job guarantee is supposed to be federal macroeconomic policy undertaken with ample fiscal space (by the highest level government also in control in the currency).
Saddling the heavily budget-constrained MTA with unnecessary labor costs, that ain't dynamic with the state of the economy, isn't it. The MTA is supposed to deliver transit, a narrow task, not do that and manage the economy writ large in unrelated ways
Indeed, many job guarantee advocates are careful to distinguish JG jobs from regular government jobs, since they don't want to end up degrading public sector institutional capacity even further.
I don't think this is a job guarantee. If running a train requires two people for regulatory reasons only, and the labor cost is significant, I would expect train service to be less frequent.
Yet another NYS/NYC own goal in progress, and one of the many symptoms of being a one party state.
Again & again our elected officials see the public service unions as their primary constituents. Transit policy in favor of transit employees rather than riders, education policy in favor of teachers unions rather than students and public safety policy in favor of police unions than actual safety.
All because these blocks of XX,000 voters in each union can be expected to vote as a block in the low turnout primaries, based on whatever political favor is/isn't being handed out.
The headline is vague, but this is about increasing the requirements to two operators per train.
It’s a make-work bill designed to maximize the number of operators on the payroll. As the article explains, the justifications don’t really add up.
> This is revealed in the last sentence, claiming that OTPO would cause “further loss of jobs to NYC.” This bill is not about safety, but rather an unfunded program designed to protect one single job type from eventual obsolescence.
Single operator has proven to be completely fine around the world. Some are starting to move to zero operator. Bills like this are designed to keep the number of jobs high. Given the expense, it inevitably comes at a cost of reductions in service elsewhere. There is no free money.
MTA is already capable of OPTO on at least 2 lines (7 & L) and even ran a a train line (L) with it.. 20 years ago, but lost to the union.
https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1l3qcn3/nyc_in_200...
So a classic NYC problem of paying for upgrades to infra to support OPTO, and then not actually being able to use it, for "reasons".
Make-work is the stupidest idea. If we want people to have an income why don't we just give it to them rather than making them do work that is useless (or sometimes harmful, see coal) to the public?
> There is no free money.
When you are talking about the MTA budget no. But at the higher government levels there often is. Lots of lower-income people's income ends up right back in the economy or reduces other costs (like healthcare of people on government health plans). Plus it oven gives people the resources (time and money) to get a job that is valuable to society. (From things like going to a education course to something like being able to have a shower before your interview and a phone to receive job offers on.) There are of course "losses" like money exiting the country or consumption of raw resources (which is likely going to happen whether they have a useless job or are just given some form of welfare) but it isn't nearly as expensive as the critics like to pretend it is.
> Make-work is the stupidest idea.
I don't know, it got the US out of the Great Depression.
Work programs can be great, if you're doing valuable work that helps the public and strengthens your nation. The US, to this day, has the largest public work program - the military. If you think about what the military actually is, it's a work program.
New york has terrible infrastructure, I doubt there's level boarding so disabled people can get on without assistance.
In many countries one person operation can work on metro systems, but NY is probably about 50 years of investment behind in infrastructure before that's a good idea.
Every NYC subway station has had level boarding forever since they were originally built. There can be some horizontal gaps for sure, which they should fix, but it's generally vertically level within the change in diameter of wheels over their lifetime. And if there are gaps, conductors are not helping anyone get on anyways.
> I doubt there's level boarding so disabled people can get on without assistance.
At every station I've ever been to, the boarding is level, and the gap is small.
Many (though not all yet) stations have elevators large enough for a disabled person in a wheelchair.
All buses (operated by the same MTA as the usbway) have a foldable ramp for wheelchairs, used quite routinely.
How many station platforms have you been to?
https://s3-prod.crainsnewyork.com/Subway%20Mind%20the%20Gap%...
https://i.redd.it/gap-at-sheepshead-bay-v0-14ea8irudhvc1.jpg...
https://images-prod.gothamist.com/original_images/90BA6BA3-A...
https://api-prod.gothamist.com/images/346940/fill-1200x650%7...
That is matter of repair, not a platform built to the wrong specifications
Why
I'm not really sure how to answer that. It is just a known fact that the subway platforms are all supposed to be level with the train floor.
Platforms can sink and otherwise decay over time. Many of the stations are quite old.
Low platforms, by contrast, are nowhere near the height of the train floor.
Wow. I used to use the Union Square station every day, but never took a 5 train from there. A sad surprise :(
Yep I can’t stand this disingenuous behavior. Really the trains should even be automated at this point. Chicago constantly has staffing issues so their service gets worse and worse and yet they insist on staying in the past.
When Chicago got rid of the conductors, trains got slower and less reliable. If you've ever had to wait on the train while the operator has to come out of the cab to help a disabled person, respond to a door fault or call button, you've been delayed by one man train operation.
In fact every time the train stops and there's a noticable pause before the door opens, that is caused by the operator having to move from the driving controls to the door controls.
Sounds like a bad train system. That has never happened in my experience where I live, and I used to take the subway everyday for over a decade.
Same. The only time the operator leaves the cabin where I live is when they're switching which end of the train they're driving from or they're taking the train out of service at the last stop. There's almost no other reason for them to ever do so.
When they have to lead an evacuation of the train, for example if there’s a derailment.
We haven't had a derailment here since 2009 where a train left the track by about a foot or so. It could happen, but in the course of normal business operations, evacuations are not a regular event here pulling operators out of their cabins. More likely is a door breaks (or rather someone breaks a door) and they have to seal it manually to keep the train moving, but I only see that happen on the older >20 years old stock and pretty much never on the newer stock.
I’ve not had any of that on the London Underground which hasn’t had a second operator for 25 years. No delays in DOO above trains - at least not the kind that a separate guard would solve.
The major impact is at stations without level boarding where assistance which should be from the platform doesn’t arrive.
CTA stopped having conductors over 30 years ago. Peak ridership and performance was in 2012, decades after the move to OPTO.
One could simply just buy trains that have door controls and driving controls in the same ergonomic layout. Other places have OPTO without these problems.
Does any of that have to do with the conductor?
Nope. Seems more like symptoms of not automating things. As if I’m calling for immediate switch to no conductors with no work.
AirTrain, which carries passengers between JFK terminals and a couple of miles to the Jamaica train station, runs completely without operators, with no room allocated for an operator, you can peer through the windshield forward. It works quite well.
But it was built this way, there were no operators to lay off, and no unions to bargain with.
Actually, there were unions to bargain with. The people wearing red at the station saying which train is which are from the same union.
Crazy idea here. Why don’t we just have the best of both worlds?
We want trains to operate more reliably, and be computer operated with just one or zero humans on board. OK, let’s do that.
MTA employees don’t want to lose their livelihoods. That’s reasonable. I’m perfectly happy to pay them their existing salary and benefits to sit at home and do nothing. We won’t hire anyone new, and the job will eventually disappear. In the meantime, anyone who already has that job, congrats. Early retirement, paid in full. Enjoy the beach. We were going to spend that money on your salary anyway, so what does it matter? There are worse things to spend taxpayer money on.
If you don't hire anyone new, the MTA union gradually loses power. That's a big no-no in the eyes of the union. Make-work bills aren't about saving jobs, but about saving power.
Alright, then add station attendant jobs. People complain about the MTA feeling unsafe, have some guys dressed up in train uniforms hang around the station, able to answer questions or deescalate any commotion.
The old guard station attendants were so good. Ask them for ANY destination and they would know it cold. MTA should be adding jobs, not removing them.
They do that already. Everyone knows they have no power, so nobody cares.
You're not taking into account two factors: union bosses don't like it because it means their fiefs shrink. Politicians/parties don't like it because it denies them a captive voting bloc. They'd actually have to do stuff like walking the length of Manhattan to get elected, rather than securing the major voting blocs by making a few backroom deals with the top unions/business leaders.
This is ridiculous conspiracy. A few thousand people in a city of millions is not a dominant voting bloc.
What matters is who votes in the Democratic primary, a pool that is usually much smaller than the total number of eligible voters.
> What matters is who votes in the Democratic primary, a pool that is usually much smaller than the total number of eligible voters.
Most "blue-collar" / "working-class" voters lean GOP nowadays:
* https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/gop-rapidly-...
* https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/11/04/new-republ...
Which is ironic given GOP policies are generally anti-worker.
A lot of folks are voting due to their (perceived) grievances and not in their actual self interest.
Do union members reliably vote in primary elections?
Yes, and they canvas too. But Mandami just won despite the all the machine unions endorsing Cuomo, so the machine now looks a lot weaker.
(Yes, the leftmost candidate had a lot less union support. Chew on that.)
Not at all. In local politics, government employee unions and their family members get their way many times because those are the people who show up to vote, including in the primaries.
Especially the cops/firefighters.
Every other union head is sweating seeing that though
I’d much rather see these people being employed at the service level.
For example when automatic checkout machines came I thought “great, more people in the aisles that I can ask stuff”. Of course that never happened so now the reality is a queue of people waiting for a machine while three are blocked because nobody is there to help people.
When automated checkout machines came in I thought “great, now it’s shorter queues and I don’t have to talk to someone and interrupt my podcast”
I was right. They are great.
Yes, nothing is worse than being forced to say "hi, how are you". I mean, that's, like, 5 seconds out of my 24 hour day. That's unacceptable.
For a long time I thought less socialization is better, because I can get things done faster. Turns out, no I can't, because actually I suck at most things. A teenager is faster at bagging than me. I suck at bagging, and that job pays 15 dollars an hour.
And also, walking around everywhere with headphones on is no fun. It's just kind of... isolating and cold. All those tiny interactions add up to making you feel like a real person living a real life.
There were shorter queues for a while. Now they aren’t.
When they started most shops (I live in France) had both standard and automatic checkout. And about three people to deal with stuck machines (mostly scale issues, anti theft tag removal, and damaged barcodes).
Now most smaller supermarkets only have the automatic queue and one person dealing with the trouble. This means that all people who really can’t use the automatic machines (kids, elderly, people doing large groceries) have to use them and the queue is constantly clogged.
It was better for a little while, now it’s strictly worse.
How about convert those jobs from train operators to bus operators and have more bus service from the same budget?
Do they have the driver licenses good for driving a bus? I suppose it requires substantial training.
if you can already drive you can probably pass a bus driving course in a day or two.
You are out of your mind. Driving a bus in NYC is one of the most difficult jobs imaginable. Maybe someone who drives a big tractor trailer would be more prepared to do it, but someone who has only driven average cars will need extensive training and practice before they can be entrusted with the lives of real passengers on the streets of NYC in all traffic and weather conditions.
Not to mention, bus drivers have to do a lot more than just drive. It’s several jobs in one. Not only do they have to do the driving they also have to do customer service, fare collection, and deal with problematic passengers.
All hail the mighty bus driver. In a just society they would swap salaries with the CEOs.
>if you can already drive you can probably pass a bus driving course in a day or two.
Yeah...No.
[0] https://www.mta.info/careers/bus-operator
[1] https://dmv.ny.gov/become-a-school-bus-driver
In a sense, you are arguing in favor of a Fifth Amendment "taking", because the company (or government) loses money by being forced to pay people to do nothing.
No small business would tolerate being required to pay people to stay home, so why should taxpayers?
Governments aren’t businesses.
Whenever I take the train at night I always sit in the front car because that's where the operator is and it's safer. Having trains with no MTA emlpoyees at all is not a way to have a safe and reliable transit system.
Why not pay someone specifically as a guard if that’s the aim? That way they can focus on security instead of having to operate the doors too. And they can handle unsafe situations.
Also NYC door operators are in their own cabin so they cannot really see the people anyways. They don’t have the training to do anything about an incident
They do. People complain about the fascism. v
How do other cities around the world make this work and make it safe then?
Typically on the U.K., if a service is rowdy and feels unsafe the guard will hide in their cabin and never emerge to do a ticket check.
In other words a no difference in personal safety between a driver only or driver and guard operation.
I’m not aware of any evidence of reduced safety in any category after introducing DOO, and if there as I suspect unions would be screaming from the hills. The only measurable impact I’ve seen is on accessibility (which doesnt mean that’s not a consideration)
Well, typically, they start with safer cities, something that's out of the purview if the MTA.
That totally flew over my head, sorry! Violence in the train didn't even occur to me while reading the comment, I thought they meant something on the lines of "the driver will have better visibility when opening/closing the doors on the front train so it's safer to go there so they cannot accidentally close them on me" or something similar. Now of course they meant there's less chance of violent behavior near the train driver, and the comment makes a lot more sense for me now.
Note: I do take the train daily, just I live in Tokyo
American cities are less safe, but the NYC subway is quite safe. Train operators will never leave their cabin no matter what (part of the rules of the job), and so do not enhance the safety at all.
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The Copenhagen metro runs perfectly well with no staff on board and feels quite safe and reliable
They could just change the drivers title to "Train attendants" like Vancouver does and their union will remain strong.
How will they farm overtime and become disabled at home?
That is a crazy idea, not because it's unique but because we already did that and "the definition of crazy is doing the same thing again and expecting a different result" (clearly idempotence was something the universe protected during this era of pithy saying making). And as usual HN has the teenage angst responses of "THEY don't want to give up THEIR power" and shit like that. Christ.
Anyway, the dockworkers were already paid off in 1977 because containerization obviated most of their jobs. So the deal we gave them was "You get paid whether you work or not". The problem with paying people when they don't work is that they can then work and use their extra money to extort you even more. Which is exactly what they did this last year. That's right, half of the striking guys weren't guys who'd be working if there wasn't a strike.
If you want to create various mobs that eat you alive while a bunch of useful idiots parrot some platitudes about unions, you should pay the unions even more money for less work.
Kipling wrote a poem here that is illustrative for all these guys who think they have "one crazy idea that solves everything" that is always this same old idea. I shall give you two lines to meditate on:
> once you have paid him the Danegeld
> You never get rid of the Dane
That could even be a way to phase in UBI gradually.
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Meanwhile in more civilized places we have trains with zero staff on board, just remote monitoring (and trains which emergency stop if they lose contact with the control centre).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...
The length ranking seems to be something like:
Riyadh - 176 km
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riyadh_Metro
Dubai - 90km, first operation 2009
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai_Metro
London DLR - 38 km
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway
Shanghai is probably in the running as it upgrades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro#Infrastructure
Singapore and Vancouver are also pretty high in the rankings.
The DLR in London was like this, but reverted to being staffed for safety.
At some point kids chased another kid onto the tracks, was one incident.
DLR has a passenger assistant who can “drive” the train in some circumstances if required (reports of trespassing on track) but is not for driving and certainly doesn’t always happen.
Only completely unstaffed vehicles in the U.K. that I can think of are short people movers like the ones at airports. Many tube lines can be driven completely automated, the drivers job on lines like the central is basically “push go, hold deadman’s switch, push door close” and repeat, but they aren’t
In other countries on lines which are staffers vehicles there are typically far more platform based staff.
AFAIK the DLR has always been staffed, there’s never been a period where it was truely driverless.
However, as it was designed for automatic train operation from the start, it is effectively “guard (US: conductor) only operation” instead of “driver only operation”, and doesn’t have a traditional drivers cab.
The REM in Montréal is driverless.
BART
From 1962 to 1964, the Times Square - Grand Central shuttle was fully automated. There was still a "motorman", for union reasons, who did not ride in the cab.[1] Worked fine, but an unrelated station fire damaged the equipment, and the automatic system was not rebuilt.
That's the simplest possible case - a train on a dedicated track, going back and forth between two stations. It's a 90 second trip.
That trip is still being driven manually today. It takes two motormen, one at each end of the train, because one person going from one end of the train to the other through the crowd would slow the 90-second operation way down. It's amazing that it's not automated today.
[1] https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/IRT_Times_Square-Grand_Centra...
Trains are the easiest form of transportation for full automation. There shouldn't need to be any required staff on board.
On the Ethan Allen Express (Amtrak) I took this week, the boarding steps to the cars had to be manually deployed by train staff, along with a little step stool. When I got on, there were two people doing this, so only two train cars were boardable.
I think non-Americans underestimate our ability to not automate things that can clearly be automated through some combination of of inertia, union power, and sheer incompetence.
It’s because Amtrak basically doesn’t matter. What’s amazing about this story is the ability of these make-work policies to survive in one of the most demanding urban transport systems. NYC baby.
Isn't NYC the same place where the unions demand one person to unplug a monitor and another to move it 1 meter?
Exactly. How can we have self driving cars before we have self driving trains?
One reason is that it's already so expensive to operate a regular train, that the expense of having one employee (or even two) isn't as significant compared to a individual transportation. Paying the taxi driver is a significant part of the cost of a taxi trip. Paying the train operator isn't a significant part of the cost a train ride.
Edit: The article claims the opposite, and maybe that's true in NYC? I did find a breakdown of costs in Germany, for a municipal light rail service: operating the train is 1860 EUR per journey overall, paying the people operating the train (one operator, possibly one conductor) is 350 EUR of that. That ratio is smaller than I would've guessed, but it's not a majority.
https://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/preisfrage-welche-kosten-ent...
It depends on whether you calculate it as including the amortized fixed costs (e.g. the cost of building the tunnels) or the incremental cost (what does it cost to have one additional passenger). If it's the first one then the cost is way higher, but then you'd have to do the same thing in the other case and include the cost of building roads etc.
However, fixed costs are better funded by general taxes than by usage fees because otherwise you pay a huge fixed cost to build something with a low incremental usage cost and then under-utilize it because recovering the sunk cost through fares causes high fares which deters uses whose value exceeds the incremental cost.
Meanwhile human labor is a significant proportion of the incremental cost, when you have humans doing things per-trip that could reasonably be automated.
There are quite a few self driving trains in service around the world [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...
Lots of places have self driving trains. Example: SkyTrain in Vancouver.
Same reason you don't actually have self-driving cars: liability.
Self driving cars do exist and operate every single day.
So do self-driving trains, or drone aircraft. The problem stands.
honestly I would have thought it was an artifact of labor unions -- at least here in the states.
Trains are topographically easy but I would suspect hide deep reliability and logistical support challenges.
There are already many autonomous trains operating all over the world. They have centralised control centers to monitor them, and then maintenance crews that can travel to work on any malfunctions or breakdowns.
This is already happening in Paris, London, Copenhagen, Singapore, Tokyo, and many more places. They all still have staff that move around the network to work on things not related to driving the train though.
So, I think you're right in pointing out that they still need many people constantly monitoring and working on the trains. But they don't need a driver per train any more, and they especially don't need two drivers per train.
There are many semi autonomous.
To go full automous you want modern signaling, platform doors (which is hard if any platforms have curves), basically all the modern safety systems.
Here's Jago Hazzard (london train youtuber), on why the London underground won't go driverless.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Eh7-n5UAYs
While the LU is very old, the system is in a much better state than the NY subway, but it is still way to much work.
Great video, thanks!
That begs the question is NY banning one person train operation because the rest of the NY system is unprepared for it?
Meanwhile there are many places with on-person operation already (and for years):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-person_operation
And even zero-person operation (GoA4):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
The site's headline is ambiguous. At first I wondered if it was some weirdly premature bill against individualized automated travel-pods.
Instead, it's about requiring at least one "conductor" (separate from a driver) to be on every train. I feel the reasonableness of this varies depending on the route and how easily the driver can summon assistance without abandoning their post.
After 20 years of riding, I can assure you that no conductor on an MTA subway train is coming to save you if anything goes down, whether there are 0, 1, 2 or 10 of them on every train.
I editted it to clarify. (I had started with the piece's original subtitle.)
Hope that helps!
The "conductor" could be in a compartment completely separate from the passengers right? This doesn't sound anything like a NJ Transit or a Caltrain conductor.
Important note: this applies to city trains, which operate in a much more predictable environment than trains that cross large areas of the country.
Are you claiming that trains running outside cities are less suitable for one person operation? There is no evidence of that, plenty of trains around the world run both inside and outside cities with a single operator. There is also no evidence of a city being a "more predictable environment". Deaths are roughly equivalent; in the city it's people jumping on tracks intentionally, outside its drivers getting stuck on crossings.
There are many other problems.
A subway or city train stops every few minutes. This means that if somebody gets hurt, has a stroke, assaults somebody, starts shooting up… there is almost immediately a way to board more staff and handle the situation.
On a train with hours and tens or hundreds of kilometers between stops this is much less the case.
I mean things like: beyond city scale, you can't assume all the technology has been tested together, you can't assume you actually know where other trains are, etc.
You can't assume those things in a subway, either. GPS doesn't work underground.
The trains ride on a track. The tracks have sensors. The sensor positions are known. Now you know where all of the trains are. GPS satellites could drop out of the sky and you’d still know where the trains are.
Yes, and those "sensors" have very limited precision. There's only one every several hundred yards.
>Yes, and those "sensors" have very limited precision. There's only one every several hundred yards.
What?
There’s one as far apart as you put them. The precision is what you make it.
More predictable maybe, but also way more intensive (only 30-60 seconds between trains, vs rural freight where many lines only see one or two trains per DAY, or even per week.
Are there are metro systems that run trains 30 seconds apart? I think the fastest is around 90 seconds.
Rarely used freight lines (aka branch lines) would never be automated, that wouldn't make sense. And some mainlines (I live near one) see as many as 4 100-car freight trains per hour. Those will never be less than one-man operation either, not least because at-grade crossings are everywhere.
If there's one thing we should know from the computer world, it is that doing something frequently makes it easier to automate.
The problem is that they run close enough together that any failures rapidly cascade until suddenly your whole network is a half hour late as it grinds to a halt...
It took thirty years for railroads to overcome union opposition and remove the caboose on trains. That's because union rules specified a full time employee in the caboose.
If people want one or two people in the loop on board commuter trains its fine by me. Really it should be a local/democratic decision.
Long haul freight trains however, should absolutely be exempt.
It seems due to the way NY machine politics works, this was passed as a "freebee" to the union without considering the broader societal impact.
There are plenty of ways to improve productivity without firing train operators — simplest way is running more service in the existing network, and also expanding the network.
This evidently wasn't disgussed — and indeed the bill lies saying there is no fiscal impact. Hopefully Governor Hochul refuses to sign it.
>It seems due to the way NY machine politics works, this was passed as a "freebee" to the union without considering the broader societal impact.
Yeah absolutely.
> Long haul freight trains however, should absolutely be exempt.
We will see automated long haul freight trains eventually, as long as their is pressure to up safety requirements (human operators being the weakest link in that).
IIRC we had a train get loose without operators in Western Australia and they just remotely derailed it, like it was nothing. Remote control would have been preferable, the incident demonstrated to me that the remote operators have the steel in their spine to destroy the companies money rather than risk human life.
The article does state it only applies to the mta fwiw.
I’m surprised to read that this is such a bad practice. Trains here in the Netherlands seem to always have two operators. I got the same impression of German trains.
Trams in Amsterdam even have two staff of board.
Mont (if not allmost all) S-Bahn trains in Germany only have one staff member. The space for wheelchairs is directly behind the drivers cabin and the few times I've seen a ramp being deployed, it took the driver 1-2 minutes (Usually the automatically deployed gap filler is good enough). A large portion (I'd guess somewhere around 20-40%) of regional trains are also only staffed with the driver. The others do have an additional staff member, but they're almost always not safety relevant and only perform ticket checks, answer questions and help with ramp deployment.
The only times I've seen more than the driver on trams/Stadtbahns/metros, they checked tickets. This also happens surprisingly rarely.
I have never seen a conductor on a metro/subway system in Europe. Mainline trains often have one, but not always. I've ridden trains on small branch lines in Germany which were operated by a driver only.
One of those staff on the trams is selling fares though.
> Labor costs are by far the single greatest expense in transit operations. This bill unnecessarily inflates these costs, ultimately shifting the burden onto riders through potential fare hikes or reducing the capacity for much-needed service improvements.
Couldn't they go ahead and put in automation for all the skilled work that the required second person would do if there were no automation, but make it so at each stop someone has to press a button to tell the automation to start?
They could then use minimum wage employees for the second person position. Would that be cheap enough to not be a significant burden?
They already do this on lines with upgraded CBTC signaling. The train runs in ATO (Automatic Train Operation) in which the driver just pushes the start button at each station. So they tried to combine the driver and conductor into one position, but the union fought back and stopped it.
Also, they can't use minimum wage employees for the driver who just pushes a button because the union would throw a fit and might go on strike.
Compared to the budget of running the trains themselves this seems like a drop in the bucket even if it is unnecessary so not really a big deal and people gotta eat. That said I think the more obvious solution to wanting or needing "busy work" with no actual purpose is instead UBI rather than requiring someone to stand around doing nothing 99.9% of the day to survive.
Labor is by far the largest share of transit operating costs.
Jump straight to zero people autonomous trains then...
They already exist in a bunch of other countries and work well
Only applies to trains with more than 2 carriages though. So it seems to apply to the busier routes. Is it for accessibility? Seems reasonable.
>Only applies to trains with more than 2 carriages though. So it seems to apply to the busier routes.
Are you thinking of locomotives? When was the last time you saw a train with 2 carriages?
“Now, S4091 will require that
A CONDUCTOR SHALL BE REQUIRED ON ANY SUBWAY OR TRAIN OPERATED BY THE AUTHORITY WHENEVER THE SUBWAY OR TRAIN HAS MORE THAN TWO CARS ATTACHED TO THE ENGINE THEREOF”
Some subway trains have exactly 2 cars.
Only the Franklin Shuttle has 2-car trains, and it'll soon be switched to 3 cars since they're replacing the 75 ft cars with 60 ft cars.
Doesn't just about every passenger train have more than 2 carriages? I'd guess the average is closer to 10.
You’re the second person to say this yet the article mentions specifically the 2 car trains the mta runs?
I don’t get why this point is being jumped on.
Yes as the article states there are 2 car trains.
OK but the article also says:
- There's only one 2-car line, the Franklin Ave. Shuttle
- That line is converting to have 3-car trains.
So to begin with, the set of small enough trains is the tiniest portion of everything the subway does, not even covering all the small "shuttle" lines. And then even that tiny exception is set to end. Big difference between "applies to the busier routes" and "applies to essentially all the routes."
During off hours and overnight trains are much shorter.
The article counts all the off peak and overnight trains, including shuttles. Even out of all of that, only the Franklin Shuttle is 2 cars and will soon be switching to 3 cars.
Could you elaborate on accessibility? NYC conductors and operators on the subway don't help passengers get onto and off of the train. (Platforms are roughly level with trains.)
Thinking more in terms of emergencies. Helpful to have someone there in those cases.
For longer trains you could make that case, though it should be the agency that makes that call, not politicians that don't have the information to make technical safety calls. Systems across the world don't seem to have issues here though. In any case, there's no world where one employee is enough for emergencies in two cars, but not enough in three, while two employees are sufficient in a train with ten cars.
Two operators? Where I live it's zero
I am ABSOLUTELY sick and tired of upstate folks making decisions for New York.
How? The state assembly vote was an unanimous "yay". In the senate, only two state senators voted against, but they were actually from "upstate". Blaming "upstate folks making decisions for New York" makes no sense here.
https://nyassembly.gov/leg/?default_fld=&leg_video=&bn=A0487...
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S4091
This isn't "upstate being out of touch," this is "the MTA union is corrupt."
I don't think the union is corrupt. The union's job is to advocate for its members. The legislators' job is to say "no, you're asking for too much".
Now try this with corporations:
"I don't think the company[1] is corrupt. The company's job is to advocate for its shareholders. The legislators' job is to say "no, you're asking for too much"."
[1] take your pick of Comcast, Boeing, or United Health
It would be nice if the union found ways to advocate for its members that were less hostile to the well functioning of the MTA.
Unfortunately, I think the hostility here is very much part of the point. It's an expression of power.
Other countries' unions are much more open minded about automation.
> Other countries' unions are much more open minded about automation.
Other countries have social services outside of "fuck you, go die".
The US sucks major ass to be a working person, period. Your job is everything. If you lose your job, you can lose it all. Most people are one or two bad weeks away from being homeless here.
Yes, the stakes are higher. My job isn't just a job - it's my health insurance, it's the roof over my head, it's the food on my table, it's my reputation.
Want people to be less hostile to automation? Great, start by making automation less hostile to them. When automation threatens your actual life, people are going to oppose it. At the end of the day, we're animals. When a Gazelle sees a Lion, they run.
You're right. The real problem is that the MTA union is a big voting and donation bloc that selects the people they negotiate against. The real solution is to do away with the MTA union. An organization founded on corruption doing its intended purpose isn't any less corrupt.
And as someone living in the top of New York, I'm ABSOLUTELY sick and tired of city folks making some of the absolute stupidest decisions for the rest of New York, but we all have to eat the same shit sandwich, so: eat up, buddy!
I think NY state concurs wrt to NYC.
So why don't y'all split the state up? NYC in one corner, the rest of NY on the other.
Then upstate folk will get real political representation in Albany, and NYC will send two interesting senators to DC. As much as I disagree with AOC I'd love for her to become a senator.
Easier said than done, as it needs consent of the state legislature and the us congress. The last time a state was split off like this was West Virginia exiting Virginia in 1863, while Virginia had seceded.
Kinda ironic that it took a civil war the last time it happened.
States can’t just decide by themselves to split up. The federation has to consent, which with our permanently deadlocked congress will never happen.
First step the state has to want to split, though. And I guarantee you that the red capitols (most of them) are game.
That leaves a small hurdle of getting a couple of purple states. Perhaps a great compromise is reached - NY ex-NYC merges with PA ex-Philly and Philly joins NYC.
More importantly the natural resources in upstate actually belong to New York, not to upstate.
They belong to the state.
But these things can be negotiated in the divorce
I completely agree with your sentiment, but the same goes the other way. I grew up in Upstate NY and people were always annoyed by the city making decisions for upstate.
I totally agree with the concept you're talking about though. Especially here - this feels like it should be a municipality's decision.
At least Shel Silver's reign of terror is over.
Planes manage to be economically viable with two pilots. Arguably modern planes are so automated only one is needed. Yet we don't see such hand wringing about that. The labour cost of train operations is so relatively small it's a non-issue.
Planes manage to be economically viable with two pilots because tickets cost on the order of 100 times more than the subway fare and aren't expected to be used by ordinary people for daily commutes, and they also travel 30,000 feet in the air so if there's trouble it can be more dangerous and complicated than something that operates on rails on the ground.
And even then the need for two pilots is pretty questionable and is primarily sustained for precisely the same questionable reason, i.e. lobbying by pilot unions.
The labor costs of trains is relatively huge, actually. Everything else is very very very efficient.
It's a little bit of electricity, not tons of jet fuel, for one.
If it's for employment or that's part of why this is being considered, I'm not sure guaranteed jobs should be rejected in this case. I'm willing to listen to arguments either way. https://theconversation.com/why-a-universal-job-guarantee-be...
Edit: thanks for the replies, I understand the situation a bit better now
>I'm not sure guaranteed jobs should be rejected in this case.
1. as an actual jobs policy it's terrible. It brings an absolute minuscule amount of jobs, and puts the burden on the part of the economy that can least afford it (ie. underfunded transit system). If you want to legislate some jobs into existence, do something like forcing social media companies to hire local content moderators, or hiring elevator attendants.
2. "universal jobs" policy is terrible in general. For one, it doesn't help the disabled or their caretakers. UBI doesn't do a perfect job here either (eg. a special needs kid probably would need way more money than the standard UBI), but at least the disabled person/caretaker doesn't need to waste time on job. For the able-bodied, a "universal jobs" policy isn't great either. If their labor is actually worth something, then they can probably find gainful employment in the private sector. If they can't (eg. they're mentally disabled), then making them to make-work like digging ditches and filling them back again as a condition of getting financial assistance is humiliating and cruel.
This has nothing to do a with a universal job guarantee like your article.
It only protects one very specific job and the people qualified to do it. Those people are also protective about letting newcomers become trained to have those jobs. They don’t want you or anyone else to be able to go get that job, they want it protected for themselves.
Such is the nature of narrow job protection bills like these.
The job guarantee is supposed to be federal macroeconomic policy undertaken with ample fiscal space (by the highest level government also in control in the currency).
Saddling the heavily budget-constrained MTA with unnecessary labor costs, that ain't dynamic with the state of the economy, isn't it. The MTA is supposed to deliver transit, a narrow task, not do that and manage the economy writ large in unrelated ways
Indeed, many job guarantee advocates are careful to distinguish JG jobs from regular government jobs, since they don't want to end up degrading public sector institutional capacity even further.
I don't think this is a job guarantee. If running a train requires two people for regulatory reasons only, and the labor cost is significant, I would expect train service to be less frequent.
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Yet another NYS/NYC own goal in progress, and one of the many symptoms of being a one party state.
Again & again our elected officials see the public service unions as their primary constituents. Transit policy in favor of transit employees rather than riders, education policy in favor of teachers unions rather than students and public safety policy in favor of police unions than actual safety.
All because these blocks of XX,000 voters in each union can be expected to vote as a block in the low turnout primaries, based on whatever political favor is/isn't being handed out.