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.
Hope that helps!
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.
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.
"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
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.
But these things can be negotiated in the divorce
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.
https://nyassembly.gov/leg/?default_fld=&leg_video=&bn=A0487...
I totally agree with the concept you're talking about though. Especially here - this feels like it should be a municipality's decision.
Edit: thanks for the replies, I understand the situation a bit better now
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.
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.
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.
Are you thinking of locomotives? When was the last time you saw a train with 2 carriages?
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.
I don’t get why this point is being jumped on.
Yes as the article states there are 2 car trains.
- 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."
At some point kids chased another kid onto the tracks, was one incident.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it was built this way, there were no operators to lay off, and no unions to bargain with.
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".
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.
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.
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...
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.
(Yes, the leftmost candidate had a lot less union support. Chew on that.)
Especially the cops/firefighters.
Note: I do take the train daily, just I live in Tokyo
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
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.
No small business would tolerate being required to pay people to stay home, so why should taxpayers?
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?
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.
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.
Trams in Amsterdam even have two staff of board.
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...
protocolture•5h ago
Long haul freight trains however, should absolutely be exempt.
Ericson2314•5h ago
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.
protocolture•2h ago
Yeah absolutely.
seanmcdirmid•5h ago
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).
protocolture•2h ago
AnotherGoodName•5h ago