I've said it before [1] and I'll say it again, even if I get downvoted to hell again: Unions
NYC has some of the strongest unions in the country. Everything from hotels to the MTA are plagued by really, really strong unions that only care about their interests -- leaving the city with a shameful transit system, in this case.
Unions make up nearly 25% of workers in NYC[2], that's more than the double the national average. The corruption is rampant[3] and the city is literally powerless against them[4].
Saying this is because of unions is like saying America has political problems because it is a democratic nation state. Democracies and unions are modes of people collectively exerting power with inherent.
The actual criticism to be made here is the pathology of all New York institutions and the people entrenched among them - the unions that serve the MTA, the people who own, build and rent the real estate, the politicians who effective rule by plutocracy.
The corruption of New York's unions is simply the end state of a city whose underlying mechanisms have all been captured by a small group of people interested only in enriching themselves. Many of those institutions are unions.
There's a difference, though: democracies (in theory) are designed to allow the majority to exert power, while unions are there to allow minorities to exert power. In this case, assuming the parent's assertion is true, you have a union that is exerting power for its own benefit, at a huge detriment to the majority. We can collectively decide that this is ok, if we want: if we value the continued employment of union members over a more efficient subway system, then that's fine. If not, then we're in trouble.
Hell, I'd be fine paying the unionized subway employees for the rest of their lives to sit at home doing literally nothing if that was the only way to get them to agree to automating their jobs away. At least then we'd have the outcome we want, and not have to pay the next several generations of subway operators to do a job that holds the system back.
Excellent counterpoint, and deserving of greater visibility. London is another example - the transit workers are heavily unionized and regularly go on strike, and yet there've been massive improvements to the Tube, which predates NYC's subway by 50 some odd years. Ever notice how narrow those tubes are, and how deep down they're dug?
To add insult to injury, construction costs for transit are much lower in Paris and London than NYC.
But let's attack the unions again, because that's less complex (and matches a popular and old political narrative) than pointing to systemic incompetence and short term thinking at the administrative level.
Although some lines are automated in London, they still have a driver to push the button.
The DLR is fully automated, but has a member of staff on board, and the 4 times I used it this year the staff member was always in manual control.
If rail doesn't get automated before cars, I don't see branch lines surviving. But then I don't see them surviving automated cars either. Main lines, sure, but I'll be getting an auto-taxi to the mainline station rather than the hourly connecting train.
> The DLR is fully automated, but has a member of staff on board
I believe the rules require a member of staff to check the doors and permit the train to depart, but that can be done from the platform instead (and is, at peak times).
Full automation will be permitted on lines with platform edge doors; the intention is to do this for the deep tubes at least for the central sections, but it's a 3-step process (replace the trains with ones that work with PEDs, fit the PEDs, then remove the driving cabs) that wasn't expected to be done before the late 2020s, and that was before the severe underfunding of TfL with the loss of central government support and the mayor's fare freeze.
Per the linked articles, unions are intertwined with the corruption. This wouldn’t be the case if unions were politically touchable. As long as there enough voters who will always say, “unions aren’t the problem”, they will be part of the problem. They get money for nothing and nobody blames them.
It is curious how unions in America behave so very differently to unions in other places.
American unions almost universally seem to be short-sighted and completely protectionist.
This isn't the case in western Europe, so it doesn't seem to be inherent to a union.
This creates a communication hurdle between Europe and America. The expectations of what a union does differ so much, you could say Europeans and Americans mean a totally different thing when using the same word.
Unions get money to fund lawyers to protect their members, and to be able to go on strike. This protection and feedback is essential for preventing companies from taking advantage of their employees.
The increasing inequality in the US can in large part be attributed to corporations winning the war against Unions. Corporations have been ruthless towards this end, including funding think-tanks that gaslight Americans.
Massachusetts just eliminated all toll plazas in the state and those workers were highly compensated and unionized. Many of those workers were retrained for other positions.
There are ways to make the union happy and the workers happy it just takes longer term thinking which governments and voters are frightently bad at.
Yes, exactly my point. Blaming 'unions' for this is simplistic to the extreme. As oyhers have already mentioned many places around the world with strong unions still maintain far better, more advanced metros at far lower costs.
Perhaps in spite of? NYC's subway is the way it is because of many factors unrelated to unionization. And the worse transit systems in the US aren't really worse because of their level of unionization.
There was an automatic light rail to Docklands in London when I last visited. In 1991.
Helsinki metro was planning to have automated trains when the western extension opens in 2014. It opened in late 2017, without automation because of technical difficulties. I have a hard time believing there will be much automated traffic on the roads here (with uneven surfaces, unclear markings, snow, and other traffic) before the metro can be automated (in a dedicated tunnel where there is no other traffic, movement is technically only possible on the rails and there is no snow).
Docklands opened in 1987 but is only GOA3 (the train runs automatically but requires a staff member responsible for departure & emergency situations).
Port Island Line (Kobe) opened as GOA4 (fully automated) in 1981 followed by Lille Metro in 1983 and Vancouver's SkyTrain in 1985.
The US has several GOA4 systems, though they're mostly airport shuttles and people movers (AeroTrain at Dulles, Monorail at Tampa, STS at Tacoma) a few serve actual communities (DPM, Metromover, Morgantown, Las Vegas Monorail).
> Helsinki metro was planning to have automated trains when the western extension opens in 2014. It opened in late 2017, without automation because of technical difficulties.
The main cause of the cancellation was political: there were difficulties with the supplier (Siemens) and the price spiralled up to the point where it would never have paid off.
The Helsinki Metro is also a bit unusual in that it uses Russian wide gauge track (for compatability with the rest of the rail system) but Western tech otherwise, meaning basically everything has to be custom made and is priced accordingly.
I don't really think the rail gauge causes any difficulties for automating the system, though. Tram gauges vary a lot and what manufacturers do is just use the same design and put underneath a different width bogie (wheelset).
(The Finnish rail gauge is in fact nominally different from the current one in Russia, because USSR changed from "imperialist" 1524 mm to "metric" 1520 mm between 1970 and 1990; the trains are in practice compatible, though.)
And here we are approaching the crux of the issue. Building a new line so it's fully automatic is relatively straightforward. Re-engineering an existing line to make it automatic (without shutting it down for months, which understandably is rarely an option) is like performing open heart surgery on a patient while he is running a marathon.
Well, and the SSR is particularly hard (given National Rail services run on parts of the LU-owned SSR infrastructure); the Northern Line automation was nowhere near as painful.
Nothing. Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Paris, Copenhagen as well all have lines that run in driverless mode. Heck, even SF Muni runs in autonomous mode in the subway, it's only run in manual mode on the streets.
> Heck, even SF Muni runs in autonomous mode in the subway, it's only run in manual mode on the streets.
That's a bit of a stretch. Muni and BART use automated train control. SFMTA went with Alcatel/Thales' awful SelTrac system that the Docklands Light Rail uses while BART uses its own monstrosity. Both systems have human operators at all times because neither system is reliable enough to run unattended.
SFMTA used to show which modes trains inside the tunnel were running in. They also used to publish detailed daily service reports that revealed just how bad things were. At one point, > 50% of trains were unable to enter the tunnel in auto mode as the VETAG transponders had a roughly 100% failure rate. For many years the trains themselves would destroy the trackside inductive loops as well, periodically disabling the train control system. Instead the MTA chose to sanitize the reports, and eventually stopped publishing the information at all.
The great irony is that Muni's train control system was so inefficient that drivers would routinely drop into manual mode upon approach to the last underground system without even so much as a heads up to the dispatchers. And then, in 2009, one of the drivers passed out and ran his train into the train parked at the platform. Instead of requiring drivers to pass a health check like the FAA does for pilots, the MTA simply forbade manual operation in the tunnel. From the pictures, that driver was easily 400 lbs and Muni only cares about drugs and color blindness. Net result: 5-10 minutes got added to each outbound trip.
BART, of course, has its own maladies -- if you've ever had to wait for the train to be repositioned before the doors open you know why they still keep their drivers around.
At this point, IMO, neither humans nor automation alone can solve the transit problem.
Everyone is blaming unions, but it is really culture. NYC is very corrupt, has been for a very long time (part of its charm), and this corruption is at all level of society. It just happens that the effects of corruption at the MTA is very visible.
Money. The technology is not hard to create, but it does take a bunch of engineers time and effort to design it all (probably a mix of mechanical and computer work), and then more time to buy the equipment and install it. There is nothing off the shelf, even if some other subway gave them all the design (unlikely), it would still be hundreds of thousands of dollars per train to make it fit the New York trains.
> There is nothing off the shelf, even if some other subway gave them all the design (unlikely), it would still be hundreds of thousands of dollars per train to make it fit the New York trains.
What? Alstom, Ansaldo STS, Bombardier, Siemens, and Thales all have off-the-shelf designs that they will happily sell. And I've probably forgotten some here. I realise none of these are American companies, and "Buy American" is often a constraint on acquisitions in the US, but it's fundamentally untrue that there are no off-the-shelf designs.
That's the com system, but there are fully automated off-the-shelf systems (com, rolling stock, …). Two examples are Siemens's VAL (Lille, Taipei's Brown, Seoul's U-line, VAL tech has also been used in Lyon's D and Paris's 14 and 1) and Hitachi's AnsaldoBreda Driverless (Copenhagen, Taipei's Yellow, Milan 5, …).
The latter is very popular and getting deployed in several places right now: Honolulu, Thessaloniki, Lima 2, Rome C, …
To nitpick, this is actually Hitachi (the ex-AnsaldoBreda part) and Ansaldo STS (which Hitachi only bought 40% of, and became its own company when Hitachi bought AnsaldoBreda).
Depending on rolling stock and space for equipment, replacing the rolling stock when replacing the signalling equipment might not be required (see, for example, the the London Underground 1995 Stock on the Northern Line).
> The latter is very popular and getting deployed in several places right now: Honolulu, Thessaloniki, Lima 2, Rome C, …
Is Breda really popular? SFMTA forbade Breda from bidding on this latest round of vehicles because the current ones have been so problematic. I don't think Chicago or Seattle had a much better experience with Breda either.
The former AnsaldoBreda… had issues (and that's really an understatement). Now owned by Hitachi, it seems like we aren't seeing the same build quality issues getting into service (though esp. in the earlier days of Hitachi running it, some issues were only found after they left the factory).
> There is nothing off the shelf, even if some other subway gave them all the design (unlikely)
VAL[0] has been a thing since the Lille Metro opened in 1983 and AnsaldoBreda[1] is being deployed all over the world (it's the platform for Honolulu's upcoming HART).
In principal Bart[0] is supposed to be operated almost automatically and the train operator is there for announcements, closing doors and watching the track for hazards. In practice, the operator does a lot of speeding up/down manually. I can't find it now, but I remember reading an article that claimed that Bart trains were operated in manual mode 90% of the time, not sure the reason.
I doubt BART runs manually 90% of the time. When run manually the speed limit is so much lower you'd know. However BART operators often have to reposition the trains manually within a station and crank the switches manually.
Vancouver SkyTrain opened in 1985 and was fully automated from day one. The rolling stock used on the majority of the system (Bombardier ART) was specifically designed for driverless operation.
Interestingly, at the time the Vancouver SkyTrain was undergoing construction, the same tech was being installed in Toronto for the Scarborough rapid transit line. The transit union in Toronto opposed automation, so the trains had to be specially modified to add operator cabins so the trains could be driven manually. Vancouver was able to get away with it because the system was a greenfield project, there was no union of subway workers around already to oppose automating the trains.
We have that in Hungary. Line 4 in Budapest is fully automated. Initially it was manually operated, then the drivers were just a fallback (or to soothe the nerves..), then they pretty much removed the driver's cabin, and nowadays anyone can stand next to and look through the front window. It's cool.
The "glitch" was decades of deferred maintenance that left sensors inoperable along the line. Theoretically now that the SafeTrack initiative is complete they should be able to return to semi-autonomous operation, but I doubt it.
I'm not expecting the DC Metro to go autonomous anytime soon either. It's a huge jobs program for inner city residents. Basically a commuter tax for a social program.
L (Manhattan/Brooklyn) is automated. The drive is there to simply signal "I'm here" to automated system. The second person on is there to mumble something that is difficult to anyone understand.
Line 1 is even more interesting as it was converted from manually driven operation to fully automated operation without without major interruption to passenger traffic. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro_Line_1)
And it was considered successful enough that they've started work on converting Line 4. After line 14 was put in service in 1998, RATP actually started drafting plans to convert lines 1, 4, 6, 7, 9 and 13.
Interestingly enough, all transit staff are trained to be conductors in cases when the automated system doesn't work. It recently snowed which incorrectly triggered the "something is on the track" sensors causing the entire system to stop. They just took all the people normally doing other tasks and made them manually drive the trains for a day until the snow melted.
Never underestimate the power of unions. They can make or break a technology. Automated driver less subway cars create a precedent which can make unions feel threatened.
Of course the reality of it is more complicated, but they are a powerful force (for better or worse).
Nothing. Viennas subway has semi autonomous trains since 1960 or so. The driver just presses a “leave station” button after verifying nobody is stuck in the doors.
Stockholm metro has this as well but I wouldn't call it "autonomous", it's just a departure button to get the train moving faster. The driver still has to grip the vigilance device after a certain amount of time.
In Vienna it's fully automated between stations. The main reason it's not fully automated is because there are no automatically closing doors in the stations. U5 is going to get it though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBDqq7rwLE0
You can quite often see the trains operate fully automatic though when the drivers are changing shifts at the end of the line. The driver typically leaves and locks the train, lets it reverse itself and then the next driver continues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eyjqS9lvNA
> In some European cities (Munich?) autonomous trains often have "drivers" who do nothing because that preferred to fighting the union.
Many cities with autonomous trains indeed have drivers. But they don't do nothing, they sit there for emergencies and to set the go signal when leaving the station. In Austria for instance that's not because of unions but because the job of the driver is at this point considered important. For fully autonomous operation you need extra security features on the track which were not employed (fully sealed off track in stations, better emergency corridors, more reliable remote door controls etc.).
Where fully automated trains are in operation there are never any drivers.
> For fully autonomous operation you need extra security features on the track which were not employed (fully sealed off track in stations, better emergency corridors, more reliable remote door controls etc.).
FWIW Lyon's Line D is fully automated (GOA4) and doesn't use enclosed track. It may have changed since but it used to not even have turnstiles, you could walk up to the track without any pause.
The only incident I can remember is a drunk who literally fell on a train from one of the elevated passages over the track.
Union culture can be significant though. From my understanding, in the US I'd expect a union to refuse any form of automation indefinitely; in other countries, they might accept it if the redundant staff are provided training for another job with good employment prospects.
Union culture is as antagonistic in France as in the US (for the same reasons that corporations are antagonistic) and it not only has multiple GOA4 metro systems running right now across the country[0], Paris is actually converting existing lines to full automation.
All of Germany (which has a much more cooperative union culture) has two GOA4 lines both in Nuremberg, meanwhile Copenhagen Metro (in highly unionised Denmark) was created fully automated back in 2002.
I see no evidence that unions have anything to do with it.
[0] quite literally: Lille, Toulouse, Lyon, Rennes, Paris
I'd be surprised if the unions representing the train drivers in France were just all "ok, cool, automate away and fire the drivers when you're done". Did they require that drivers be employed in other positions, or receive some sort of training for different jobs?
Unions in the US are annoyingly different: most (at least those that I'm even passingly familiar with) seem to have one major goal: keeping the status quo (with regular pay and benefits increases for its members, of course). They generally do not go for "hey, we're going to eliminate your jobs, but we'll compensate you in such a way that you'll continue to be gainfully employed elsewhere".
> I'd be surprised if the unions representing the train drivers in France were just all "ok, cool, automate away and fire the drivers when you're done". Did they require that drivers be employed in other positions, or receive some sort of training for different jobs?
Often that topic does not even come up because companies are not firing people to begin with like they do in the US. They just transition into a new role (for instance they could become light rail drivers in the same network where automation is not yet achievable).
Interesting. Is there that much slack in employment to cover that? I mean, if you automate a transit line, presumably you're displacing dozens of now-former train operators. It would surprise me if they always have productive, useful jobs to move people to in these situations.
DC Metro use to but then there was a major accident that resulted in them reversing the system. They plan to eventually make them driverless in the future.
