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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See what we could achieve if we unionized software industry? Come on people, get on board, this fantasy of being exempt from worker solidarity is such an American "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" thing that is not serving anyone.
We can all agree that the code written by one person is clearly unsafe, we need 100% pair programming by law and at least 15 people and 2 scrum matsres per scrum to ensure proper working conditions.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 31.4 ms ] threadLong haul freight trains however, should absolutely be exempt.
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.
Edit: thanks for the replies, I understand the situation a bit better now
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.
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.
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?
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...
They already exist in a bunch of other countries and work well
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_screen_doors
* 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
We can all agree that the code written by one person is clearly unsafe, we need 100% pair programming by law and at least 15 people and 2 scrum matsres per scrum to ensure proper working conditions.