New York’s bill banning One-Person Train Operation
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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.
Sure it’s rare. But what happens when it does happen, last thing you want is passengers self evaccing onto 3rd/4th rail energised tracks.
The major impact is at stations without level boarding where assistance which should be from the platform doesn’t arrive.
Click on "Show step-free accessibility", quite useful.
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.
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.
> 14th Street–Union Square northbound 4 trains have a 5.5-inch vertical gap, 59th Street–Columbus Circle northbound B trains have a gaping seven-inch horizontal gap, and Times Square–42nd Street eastbound 7 trains have both: a 5.5-inch vertical gap and a five-inch horizontal gap
https://www.curbed.com/2022/10/mta-subway-platform-gaps-laws...
> 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.
I'm not against make-work per se, but we are currently in an era where we need to improve public sector administrative capacity. It's really hard to do that while saddling agencies with make-work, because the latter is so bad for esprite de corps.
It would better to e.g. expand peace corps / Americorps. And if they want to staff do-nothings on subways, they can, but it needs not involve the MTA.
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.)
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.
Especially the cops/firefighters.
Note: I do take the train daily, just I live in Tokyo
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)
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.
I was right. They are great.
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.
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.
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.
The problem for union negotiation is that it would be considered a demotion / harder job.
This is why the best thing to do is just run more service while automating lines. And eventually build more network too.
Yeah...No.
No small business would tolerate being required to pay people to stay home, so why should taxpayers?
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
At some point kids chased another kid onto the tracks, was one incident.
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.
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.
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:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...
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...
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.
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.
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...
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!
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-person_operation
And even zero-person operation (GoA4):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...
What?
There’s one as far apart as you put them. The precision is what you make it.
I’m not entirely sure what you are trying to argue. Your original comment said you can’t know where trains are on underground subways because GPS doesn’t work underground, but that’s not the technology they use anyways, so it doesn’t make sense to reference it. The you seemed to argue that what might currently be in place is insufficient, but that wasn’t what this thread was talking about.
The only one showing ignorance here seems to be you suggesting subways use GPS.
Not sure whether this means that the various signalling suppliers are waiting for a customer to take on the technical risk of being the first to deploy UWB CBTC, or that there were costs or disadvantages that make it unattractive.
And yes, all the technology has been tested together. Before a train can enter a new region of authority, it must have permission from that authority, which means they must prove that the train can work with the local tech.
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.
All that means is that you design the system very robustly. And, of course, trains fail-to-safe. Cut a brake line? Train can't release its brakes. Signal out? Conductor can only move in GoA0 (manual), at reduced speeds, until the next signal is reached (and readable). Etc.
Long haul freight trains however, should absolutely be exempt.
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.
Yeah absolutely.
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).
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.
Trams in Amsterdam even have two staff of board.
The only times I've seen more than the driver on trams/Stadtbahns/metros, they checked tickets. This also happens surprisingly rarely.
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.
They already exist in a bunch of other countries and work well
"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
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 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.
The "machine" politicians who these less-than-enligtened unions tend to support are actually more to the right (of the Democratic party) and less interested in expanding the welfare state. In fact, there have been times the unions are explicitly against more benefits to the general public because they feel they weaken union contracts in comparison (stuff that only they got before now everyone gets).
I wish I was kidding with these things...
European style sectoral bargaining is much better, and makes for much more enlightened unions. Hopefully we get it in the US, there are some positive signs it might be possible.
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.
They don't exactly brag about their state's loyalty to the nation back then.
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.
Shel Silverstein?
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.
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."
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.
It's a little bit of electricity, not tons of jet fuel, for one.
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.