Posted Dec 31, 2019, 4:42 PM
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West End & Riverside
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Join Date: Jun 2017
Location: UWS NYC, Dörfli Zürich
Posts: 508
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An insightful editorial from a NY City/State independent journalism site written by Alon Levy, a public transport advocate and expert.
Don’t block subway automation
A misguided bill would prevent subways from using automation to save money and improve service.
Quote:
The state Senate is reviewing a bill by state Sen. Kevin Parker that would prohibit the practice of one-person train operations on the New York City subway. A similar bill passed the Senate in 2017 but died in the Assembly. Right now, practically all subway trains have two-person crews, consisting of a driver and a conductor, who operates the doors and makes announcements. Management has long sought to reduce crew size to one, at least on some lines, by using partial automation to combine the operator and conductor jobs. So far the Transport Workers Union has scuttled all attempts to introduce partial automation to New York City’s subway main lines. Parker’s bill would enshrine this wasteful practice of overstaffing in law.
The bill’s supposed justification, which is safety, is based on falsehoods. Since many other cities around the world use only one staffer per train, Parker contends New York is different because of its size, with a reference to “the New York city subway system, the largest public transit system in the world.” This is incorrect: By ridership on subway lines or subway-like commuter rail lines, New York doesn’t even crack the global top 10. The two biggest European urban rail networks, those of Moscow and Paris, exclusively use one-person crews. The largest system in the world, Tokyo, uses a combination of one- and two-person teams.
Anyway, the size of a system isn’t even the most relevant variable: It’s the size of the train, and some other cities have fewer conductors and larger trains. Parisian commuter trains pack 2,000 passengers with just one crew member every day at rush hour.
New York exceptionalism relies on views of how important and developed the city is that are generations out of date, limiting the MTA’s ability to learn from global best practices, which include automation across rich and middle-income countries. Many of those systems are even transitioning toward full automation, with driverless lines in operation or in testing in Paris, Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo.
New York City Transit may not be unique in its size or complexity, but it is unique in its high costs. This goes beyond construction costs, covered in the media by myself and others. The operating costs on the subway are the highest per car-mile among the major metro rail systems of the world. Among the big American systems, the only one that’s as expensive to operate as New York City Transit is Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which went to one-person train operation recently and still employs former conductors in miscellaneous positions, letting them go by attrition, according to several sources at the Boston-based advocacy group TransitMatters.
London has had similar fights for a generation – the Underground began using partial automation at the end of last century, but some suburban commuter lines have waited longer. In 2013, there was a fight about one-person operation on the London Overground, which consists of suburban lines operated by Transport for London, which also runs the London Underground. The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, which represents train crew members, claimed conductors are needed for safety, but Transport for London noted that on the Overground, the already partially automated East London Line was actually safer than the rest. In accidents involving improper door opening, the East London Line averaged one incident per 7 million trips, compared with one per 4 million on the rest.
If anything, the computer control with one-person operation would improve safety in New York. The New York Times reports that in 2017, there were 900 incidents of people falling onto tracks, getting side-swiped by trains or otherwise accidentally intruding on the system. In 2012, these incidents led to 55 fatalities.
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Continued: https://www.cityandstateny.com/artic...utomation.html
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