December 20, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:Strike!
So the transit system has shut down.
It's not affecting me personally; I'm just working from home. (Although I am missing our editorial holiday lunch, and I will be unable to inflict holiday baked goods on my coworkers, since my office closes for the holiday this afternoon.) Other people aren't so lucky. Midtown traffic is ordinarily very bad; on the worst bits of the avenues you can expect to go about one twentieth of a mile every 2-3 minutes (one block per stoplight cycle). But today it is, if you can imagine such a thing, even worse. The news shows are full of people trying to walk to work across the Brooklyn Bridge. It's cold out there.
A few blocks to the north of me, 96th street is blocked off by police lines; I saw them when I was out walking the dog. It looks like something out of one of those movies where right-wing militants turn America into a police state and you have only 72 hours to get the secret plans to the rebels before you go straight to video.
The union, meanwhile, is running ads on local cable whining that they didn't want to strike, they just had to because the MTA is so awful to them. This is not true. The union is very hard left, like transit unions in most places. I'm not sure why this should be; perhaps because most of the workers have to do very little to earn their pay. The train drivers don't actually, y'know, drive; the rails take care of that. I'm told that they could easily be replaced with the kind of self-driving systems you see in airports, if the union weren't so powerful. Admittedly, the conductors are highly skilled: it takes them years to learn to mumble into the announcement microphones in a secret language that no one in the entire world except them understands. But their main useful task appears to be sticking their heads outside the window to make sure no one's limbs are sticking out of the train, a job that could be eliminated if idiots didn't try to cram themselves through closing doors because they know the conductor will keep the train from driving off with their arm waving out the door. And the primary responsibility of the toll both workers is making sure that the line to buy Metrocards never gets shorter than ten feet. All of these jobs leave a great deal of time for contemplation, which the transit workers presumably spend eradicating every vestige of false consciousness.
The point being that the workers did indeed want a strike. They've been itching for it for years. That's because they know they will win. In the private sector, the company would probably fire them and replace them with machines. But this is not the private sector, and the transit union controls not only a large number of votes, but a huge amount of funding. The City Council recently changed the law to allow political campaign contributions to come from individual locals, rather than the national union. That means that they can swing a huge chunk of change by getting locals from around the counry to donate to our council members.
There's a surprising upsurge of sentiment for going Ronald Reagan on them. This will not happen; Reagan had a large reserve of skilled air-traffic controllers from the military that he could instantly deploy to take over the ATC jobs while new people were trained. There's no such reserve of non-union train drivers, and while driving a subway train is not exactly rocket science, transit folks are still haunted by the fact that one of the worst subway disasters in New York history occurred when scabs were brought in during a strike in the early twentieth century. That's even presuming that there were union-busters in the Metropolitan Transit Authority; there aren't. The organization is solidly Democratic, as is the city power structure that is trying to influence the negotiations.
But the union's position is surprisingly unsympathetic, even to liberal New Yorkers. The workers make an average of $55K, more than what your average New York journalist makes. They have a lavish pension, on which they can retire at 55, and incredible benefits. And yet to judge from their interactions with ordinary New Yorkers, you would think that they were enslaved in Egypt. Everyone I know detects an expression of positive glee on the faces of the conductors who close the door just as you are getting to it, or the booth operator who makes you stand there, watching the trains come and go, while she stacks her pennies in orderly piles. No one I've talked to feels that they are entitled to more money, fewer disciplinary hearings, or better benefits. Everyone seems pretty eager to see the transit workers forced to wait until their sixties to retire like the rest of us. It's not as if the bulk of the jobs are so physically demanding that it's unreasonable to expect them to keep sitting in their booths for another ten years.
It won't happen. The union will win, as unions always win in New York City. All this strike is doing is providing moderate excitement to stranded New Yorkers before the MTA caves. Sic semper tyrannis.
Posted by Jane Galt at December 20, 2005 7:22 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksThis happened in Philadelphia a couple of months ago. The story that stuck me was that one of the Septa (SouthEastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority) employees was a young single mother who was forced to strike. She was a new employee, so she didn't have any money saved up for reasons like this, and from what I gathered she had a tough time making ends meet even when she was getting a paycheck. The older Septa employees had private nest eggs saved up for reasons like this, by that, I mean a nest egg to live on while striking. This poor, young, single mother got the shaft from the older, selfish Septa employees. So did every peripatetic in Philadelphia. So did every small shop or store owner in the train and subway stations.
Anyone know if the MTA employees are paid while they are on strike?
rick, its my understanding that the strikers will be fined two days' salary for every day the strike is on.
the laundry place down the street just opened, so i'm not nearly as hosed as i thought i was earlier this morning, but does anyone here know how the hell i'm supposed to make from the East 50's to LGA on thursday morning?
I'd recommend those airport shuttles, the name of which temporarily escapes me. They cost something like $10-20. And yes, allow A LOT of time.
Sounds like you hale and hearty New Yorkers need to toughen up for a while and push back at the union. Can it really take very long to hire and train new people? Wouldn't the city have been smart to have begun doing this a while back?
Ahh, hindsight.
Could someone tell me again why I want public transport over, say, more roads and cars?
In my own case this is moot, since the first 1.5 miles I drive to work is gravel/mud/dusty one lane section line road, but still it seems to speak against the public transportation utopia desired by city planners.
Jane,
Excellent post. I'm only getting a temporary reprieve from this fiasco by the fact that I have a couple of already scheduled vacation days this weeks. About the only thing that could tilt things against the TWU is the threat of fines imposed by Albany. Ed Koch was on the television news this morning urging just that.
That said, looking at the two sides arrayed here, I'm inclined to think of the old line from Kissinger: I really wish there was a way they could both lose. The MTA is pretty much a management and financial mess. While the MTA would itself be among the county's top 10 states in terms of bond issuance, they've long had difficulties with financial transparency. In fact, every few years we're treated to stories about how station renovation budgets were disbursed while no renovations actually took place. That doesn't even address the issue of how operating expenses get treated as capital investments (WorldCom, anyone?). And just days before a major strike they push through their new "politeness" rules.
Will, call a car service now and make a reservation. I booked one for $40 from upper east side to lga for tomorrow night and will try to book a backup.
thanks, but alas, my flight leaves at 7:00 am, and i don't think the shuttles start until 6:45 or so.
yay! blue christmas!
rmark-
Whats the alternative to public transportation in a city? Does anyone know of cases where private transportation (but with subways, trains, etc.) has worked in a city? In most cities that I have been to, there is no room for more cars and roads. Many people that commute to work in the city take public transportation. Suburbs outside the city have also been booming where there is a close train stop for a train heading to the city.
Well, plenty of us got to work today, via the other mass transit options still available. I took the LIRR instead this morning, which, while crowded, was a quick and smooth ride.
I wonder if Albany can decertify the TWU. That would be neat.
If the transit workers knew how easy they have things, compared to most people of equivalent skill levels in the private sector, they'd be on their knees thanking whatever Higher Power they believe in, that they've got it so well. While it's true that the working conditions aren't always the best, for example getting days off is often a hassle, the combination of pay, fringe benefits and early retirement can be found in very few other places.
I agree with an earlier comment, however, that the MTA is a hopelessly incompetent organization.
"Worst bits," Jane? British spelling is one thing, but British idioms?
Reagan didn't have a "large reserve of skilled air-traffic controllers from the military that he could instantly deploy." There were only 900 military controllers, compared to 5,000 supervisors and non-striking controllers. The PATCO strike didn't end immediately; the FAA hired lots of new controllers and simply remained undermanned for years.
Many of the NYC Transit workers don't want to strike. They think they have to because the union told them to. Fire everyone who doesn't return to work in 48 hours, leave the tollbooths empty, and offer concessions only to the train dispatchers and engineers, who can't be replaced as quickly as everyone else.
rmark,
Umm...how do you propose to put roughly 7 million people with cars onto a relatively small island every day? Where do you propose to put all of these new roads? Sorry, but New York is one of those few cities that essntially can't function without a working mass transit system.
Rick, I think at least theoretically you could privatize and permit more competition. The buses could be run by one company, the subways by another for example. You could also allow van services, which I think are illegal in NYC, to operate. You're right not everyone in Manhattan is going to be able to drive to work each day on a one person per car basis. More congestion pricing might be good too. Of course none of these are politically practical.
The MPLS airport's unmanned train is pretty smooth.
Hey, its not my fault those people haven't been voted off the island.
I grew up in a suburb of Oklahoma City, at one time the largest city by land are, not population. My dad remembers the street cars that ran behind his house in the 1930's and 40's.
I've never lived anywhere that really had public transportation. My comment was not directed so much at the current strike, as to the concept of light rail as the holy grail of city planners, when superimposed on a city that develpoped after the street car era - it already has sprawled.
When Mike Quill ran the transit union in NYC in the 50s & 60s, the strike was always scheduled for New Years Eve. I don't know when this schedule changed, but the holiday transit strike in NYC is an old (though not cherished) tradition.
The union heads called the strike and they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. A year or two at Attica and a couple of $ million in fines might help them understand.
"Reagan had a large reserve of skilled air-traffic controllers from the military...to take over the ATC jobs while new people were trained"..I don't think this is correct. It took a long, long time for the ATC system to recover from the loss of so many experienced people. And one of the reasons for the excessive grandiosity of the attempted ATC computer system revamp (the "Advanced Automation System") was the attempt to make the system less manpower-dependent following the strike.
I don't think most subway jobs are anywhere near comparable to an air traffic controller job in skill levels...maybe the train dispatchers, but certainly not the motormen or the fare collectors.
rmark-
Hey, its not my fault those people haven't been voted off the island.
Who exactly are "those people"? People that don't drive a car in the city because its mostly pointless?
Even when the public transportation system isn't the best, it still is greatly effective at getting vast amounts of people in an out of the city, and allowing people to move within the city cheaply and easily.
As for those employee fines for striking, NY law is like most states: no paycheck deductions, aside from taxes or other governmental decree, without the employee's prior signed consent. So unless some court issues 35,000 separate orders, the fines are just wishful thinking.
Interesting to note, too, Toussaint's direct order to strike to the Union's shop stewards and leadership. Agency between the union as an organization and its various actors is much tougher to establish as a matter of law than one would think. This often insulates the union organization from exposure for illegal strikes, violence, etc. even when conducted by shop stewards, etc. and so the more sophisticated union leaders have become pretty adept at hinting and winking about doing x but never actually stating do x. Here, Toussaint has basically come out and dared someone to apply NY's no public strike law to his union, a dare he would, of course, never issue unless he thought he would win.
Just two more bits of fuel for the "the union will win, as unions always win in New York City" fire.
Enjoy yourselves.
rmark,
I think I may be missing your argument, but I still have to reply to your "voted off the island" comment. As a practical matter, the country needs, because of network effects, to have people in a couple of major industries finance, media, and advertising, for example to be in a small centralized location. Because of it each of these get to be much more efficient. As a practical matter, voting off the island just isn't going to cut it. Disbursing them is going to make everyone worse off.
That said, the latter part of your post is pretty well right. Trying to superimpose preautomotive plans and structures on postautomotive cities for whatever reason just doesn't make any sense. The attempts wind up white elephants that nobody uses because the planners somehow feel it makes sense to have someone commute into city center and back out to another suburb in order to avoid driving 10 miles.
Ironically, automotive sprawl has been superimposed on some of our preautomotive cities by the legacy of previous planners. Specifically, Boston and Philadelphia come to mind. Crowding is icky and bad. So, no building can be taller than Billy Penn's hat (In Boston, it was the John Hancock statue, if my wife recalls correctly.). As Gomer Pyle would say, "Surprise, surprise, surprise". You end up with real estate prices going through the roof and the suburbs sprawling. At that point, the next generation of planners find they have no way of reimposing the old hub-and-spoke mass transit system on the sprawl.
Someone, somewhere should let would-be planners know that the great visionary planners like Moses or Bacon generally caused more harm than good.
For your enjoyment, and provided without comment, here's how much the MTA loses per passenger per year.
New York City Transit: $647 loss
Long Island Rail Road: $4,165 loss
Long Island Bus: $1,023 loss
Metro-North Rail Road: $1,739 loss
Bridges and tunnels: $1,817 profit
I'm not making this up: The guy who heads the transit union local here in the D.C. area is a member of a Stalinist party, the something-or-other Revolutionary Communist Party. Apparently they've got quite a few inroads into the Amalgamated Transit Union locals around the country.
100 years ago, most city and suburban transit systems were private companies. If one was on strike, you could - very likely - find another going in the same direction that wasn't on strike.
What killed them? Escalating property taxes.
Any resurrection of private companies, in NYC or elsewhere, will pretty much be moot without exemption from property taxes.
Creech-
Aren't there logitistical and economic problems preventing private companies from creating a network of subways in a city?
For example, how could more than 1 company fit all their subways underneath a busy street? Wouldn't a private monopoly be inevitable with the high fixed costs and very low marginal costs involved in constructing subways?
Don't forget the other little side effect: every nickel that the city loses due to this strike (not only the settlemnt with the union, but the revenues lost due to the strike itself) will be paid by us. Neither side of this issue gives s**t one about that little 'benefit'.
I would love to see the city break the union, as a commenter has proposed, but I agree with Jane that this is a simple impossibilty because the guys in charge are ideological soulmates with the strikers.
Russ
Bill: Mass transit is what New York requires.
There is no reason busses and subways and trains need to be owned by the City or the State.
(There are plausible arguments from efficiency, but it seems obvious that NYC's case is not one where the efficiencies of centralisation are at the fore, no?)
David Foster:
It's not so much that transit jobs require great amounts of training (except for some jobs in the maintenance yards), it's that they require specialized skills not found outside the transit field. It would be just about impossible to hire replacement workers who could step right in and take over from the strikers. While a few weeks of training might be enough to restore a reasonable level of service, that's a long time for the city to be transit-less. This is assuming, of course, that such a step would be possible in New York's political climate, of course it isn't.
AT:
With some tweaking, the subway *possibly* could generate enough money from fares to cover its operating expenses. I don't believe it would be possible to cover capital expenses without subsidies, however, and in any event the city buses are huge money-losers.
a few minor nits about the person claiming
that you can't fit private company's subway
systems beneath the streets:
look at the history of the new york subway
system. It was originally several competing
private companies.
The paris metro was originally built and operated
by competing corporations.
I don't know exactly how it works in NYC, but I know in Argentina train and subway driving is more stressful than you would imagine, mainly because of people's tendency to throwing themselves into the tracks. That is the usual rationale for their early retirement.
Having said that, I am amazed that the system is completely shut down, with no emergency service at all.
Regarding profitability, I think a huge part of the problem is the huge subsidy to people who live outside Manhattan. It is just absurd to have a trip from Flushing to the Bronx cost the same as one within Queens, or within Manhattan. This is of course related to the system being public.
sigivald,
I never implied that they did. Nor did I mean to. You may be confusing me with another commenter. I'm pretty much an agnostic on that issue. Basically, my bottom line is the same as that of most New Yorkers: the city must have mast transit, and the status quo isn't doing that good a job of providing it for the last few years.
The NYC Subway system was originally built by private companies, and ran under private ownership until 1940. There are many references for this, but one is at this site. I think there's a Wikipedia entry as well. The private lines went bankrupt, and you can start an argument over why that can easily fall into recognizable pro big gov't/ anti big gov't lines. The pro gov't folks use the financial collapse of the private lines as evidence that you have to have a government entity run something like mass transit. The free market types explain that the private lines ran under the whim of the goverment and were subject to excessive regulation over service, price, spending, even their maintenance and capital improvements. However, it ran for almost 40 years under private management, so it is at least possible. Whether it would be better today is another debate.
By the way, public transit is not a synonym for mass transit.
Re the transit strike: there are several things that the MTA has done wrong; some short-term, some long term. Signing a contract that expires in the dead of winter, when the customers suffer terribly if there is a strike, is the most obvious mistake. The union's leverage would be reduced by half if the contract expired in, say, June. A strike then would, at least partially, be fun. And having the contract expire during the Christmas rush, when businesses make a good part of the year's earnings (and the city's yearly sales tax collected) gives the union that much more power. Influencing the expiration date is not that hard; I know because I negotiated with a tough union for 30 years. An expiration date is not a deal-breaker; compared to the bread-and-butter issues, it doesn't mean that much to the members.
Unifying the bus system and the subway system, and dealing with a single union, although done by prior MTA officials, is a piece of idiocy and should be made a campaign issue by the two major parties in elections for both mayor and governor. A state law MUST be passed splitting the two systems and requiring union contract expiration dates well apart. This change, perhaps more than any other, would reduce the monopoly power of the union.
The quality of an elected offiicial is most determined by the quality of the officials he appoints. Gov. Pataki is among the worst in this respect. He has used his appointive power to pay back political favors. The head of the MTA is a prominent real estate developer who not only knows nothing about transit, he lacks elementary judgement as, for example, picking a date just before the union contract expires to announce a huge (temporary) surplus, part of which was used for a fare reduction as a kind of Christmas present. Since, in my experience, even intelligent union people are convinced of a delusion--that there is a huge cache of funds being hidden somewhere , and all they have to do is to apply enough pressure to pry it loose--it was madness for the MTA to encourage this fantasy.
Going forward, we have to elect a governor who promises to appoint an MTA that is competent and imaginative. It has to abolish the job title of conductor. This would reduce the cost of labor by maybe 25%. I have never ridden any other subway in the world that has them. Next, the MTA has to use what remains of its bond-issuing power to be able to abolish the job title of train operator. Line 14 of the Paris subway has been successfully operating for years fully automatically and they would be delighted to sell the MTA their equipment and technology.
AZKSanders:
--Well, no other large subway system in the world runs 24 hours a day to as many stations. And no other system routinely runs as many trains as lengthy as NYC. Concerns about safety (about crime, draggings, or terrorism) are not trivial. I'm not saying those concerns are persuasive, but the NYC subway system is in many respects a unique one, so comparisons to other systems don't prove much.
--The MTA has been trying to automate the subway system, but those efforts have been limited principally by the complexity and cost of retrofitting a 100-year-old system. Line 14 in the Paris Metro is brand new, and was built with that automation. So, again, simple comparisons don't prove anything. The MTA has already tried automating one isolated line (the L line) but it has taken many years and many dollars with little to show for it.
Next, the MTA has to use what remains of its bond-issuing power to be able to abolish the job title of train operator. Line 14 of the Paris subway has been successfully operating for years fully automatically and they would be delighted to sell the MTA their equipment and technology.
If wishes were subway cars . . .
The reason Line 14 in Paris "has been successfully operating for years fully automatically" is that it was built from scratch and opened only seven years ago.
The New York City subway uses traffic lights to instruct engineers and primitive electromechanical switches to tell dispatchers where the trains are. See here for more on the signaling system. The whole system runs on pre-war control technology. That's the first war, mind you. You think it would take less than decades and tens of billions of dollars to modify hundreds of miles of track, thousands of control boxes, and millions of miles of ancient wire in a system that never shuts down and that is horrendously overcrowded already? Good luck with that.
"The train drivers don't actually, y'know, drive; the rails take care of that."
So what your saying here is that the rails drive the train?i hope you have your eyes checked,there
are drivers that operate and drive the trains.
the rails are there to guide the train along the
line.
"I'm told that they could easily be replaced with the kind of self-driving systems you see in airports"
LOL,i wonder if you take the subway.the system is
over 101 years old.putting in a what you call a "self-driving" system is not easy.
"the conductors are highly skilled: it takes them years to learn to mumble into the announcement microphones in a secret language that no one in the entire world except them understands. But their main useful task appears to be sticking their heads outside the window to make sure no one's limbs are sticking out of the train, a job that could be eliminated if idiots didn't try to cram themselves through closing doors because they know the conductor will keep the train from driving off with their arm waving out the door."
A conductors job is more then just sticking your head out,opening and closing doors.and if you say
learing to make announcements takes years,how long
does it take you to get from your kicthen to your
living room?
as for the strike and my view on it,i hope this
strike ends soon.the MTA needs to do something and
soon.i put the blame of this strike on Gov. George Pataki and the MTA.
"There's no such reserve of non-union train drivers"
Ah, but there is - hire them from New Orleans.
I see that it could be quite difficult to shut down subway lines to upgrade them because of the complexity of the system and traffic volume. But we are able to shut down portions of major freeways and streets to upgrade while forcing drivers to take alternate routes. What is so different about a subway system?
Back to an earlier tangent--roads are not free. A great deal of money is spent on bulding, expanding, and maintaining them. Additional funds are required for policing them and imposing traffic laws and all of these expenses come from the public chest. The fair comparison is to look at the true costs of cars compared to subways. And as others have mentioned, it's hard to see at this point how the current complexity of the subway could be managed with competing companies. Does anyone know if there are public transit companies in the world that are profitable? I know that trains are a losing prospect economically for transporting people as compared to freight.
You think it would take less than decades and tens of billions of dollars to modify hundreds of miles of track, thousands of control boxes, and millions of miles of ancient wire in a system that never shuts down and that is horrendously overcrowded already?
Why would you have to do that? You could replace the train operator with an electronic map and inertial navigation system that resynced at each stop. Add in an electronic eye to spot the "traffic light" signals (the inertial navigation will tell you when to expect them and what position they will be located at) and it'll do the job fine.
Also, my understanding is that the train operator is capable of communicating with the dispatchers -- that there's some form of radio communication available between the car and a central location. If this is correct, then you don't need most of the dispatchers either -- the automated system could make use of that bandwidth to report its location to a central system.
You could do all of the above without removing or replacing any of the existing infrastructure.
Adding to Dan's comment, you wouldn't even need something as "complex" as an inertial navigation system. Since trains are on rails the exact path is known at all times and the integral of the speed could be used to find the position along the line.
The pre-existing infrastructure makes finding a solution cheaper, not more expensive.
The New York City Transit Authority had a robot subway train running in regular operation way back in 1962 on the 42nd Street shuttle. But when a station fire at Grand Central destroyed the train, the TA, and then the MTA, never tried to develop another one (much to the union's satisfaction).
The 1918 strike and the subway crash at Prospect Park in Brooklyn that killed 97 people also was the beginning of the end of the private operation of the city's subways. Combined with the city's refusal to allow the BMT and IRT to raise the fare above 5 cents, they ended up forcing both into receivership (though the BMT did recover for a time) and both lines were taken over under Fiorello LaGuardia in 1940, after the mayor during the 1918 disaster, John Hylan, started up the IND and made sure the city-owned subway lines would paralell the privately-owned lines, in order to further reduce business (it's also worth noting that before the city takeover, new lines were being built almost all the time; after 1940, only a few miles of new track has been built in the past 65 years, with any expansion at all coming from buying out former railroad lines and converting them to subway use).
The MTA has been a little better in operating the system over the past 20 years -- anything would be better than how they ran it the first 15 years they were in charge -- but they also have that huge bond debt coming due around 2010 or so, which means that $1 billion surplus that is supposed to make MTA management look good and is what Toussant and the TWU are lusting over is nothing but a sham, and will be gone in a shotr time even if the new contract doesn't give the MTA workers a penny more in benefits.
The whole "surplus" is a sham. The MTA's operating revenue is in the $-3 billion range. If it has a "surplus," that just means it shook down the taxpayers especially well.
I'm not really convinced by Dinky, AT, and Jose's insistence that the status quo is an inevitability. Try taking the subway after midnight on any weekday. Try getting off at Courtland Street. It becomes pretty clear, pretty quickly that track, and even stattions, can be shut down for temporaty periods to allow for augmentation. Moreover, the state has already committed to a multi-billion dollar bond issue for various MTA projects - 2nd Ave subway, extension of LIRR to Grand Central, etc. It seems to me that its becoming all too obvious that the return on automation expenditures from reduced labor costs is much higher than the return from the additional lines running at a deficit.
I am glad that my comments on how to re-balance the huge monopoly power of the TWU and us--the users of the system--generated so many useful thoughts so quickly.
Let me comment first that the struggle is not between the MTA and the TWU, as the strikers' signs suggest. It is between union members who are paid up to $65,000 yearly (depending on overtime put in) plus generous health benefits and pensions at age 50 or so--versus passengers who average maybe $35,000 with no health or pension benefits. A look around a subway car tells you this. How many passengers are wearing suits and ties? Almost all are clearly poorly-paid. So, not to sound too demagogic, union members want to use their monopoly power to raise the fares of people who earn less than half what they do.
To get back to my specific suggestions for countering union power and reducing transit operating costs, there were five in all.
1. I suggested a contract expiration date other than in the dead of winter. No technical break-thoughs or investments needed. No one commented.
2. I suggested a contract expiration date other than during the Christmas season. No technical break-throughs or investments needed. No one commented.
3. I suggested separate unions and contracts with separate expiration dates for the bus system and the subway system. No technical break-throughs or investments needed, though probably a state law would be. This is a political problem, though not insuperable. It requires political activism, something we can all contribute to.
4. I suggested getting rid of conductors. Here there were comments: our subway doesn't shut down at night (true, but it's not obvious why this demands conductors); our subway has many stations (true, but it's not obvious why this demands conductors); our trains are long (true, but there are ways of dealing with it. In Paris, there are big mirrors for the train operator to be able to see the length of the train. Where he or she can't, there are closed circuit TV and large screens. The comment was also made that we have problems of safety: crime, dragging, terrorism. Since the train operator is in constant radio communication with headquarters, in Paris help can readily be summoned.)
I might also add that Paris trains run on schedule because they do not have doors that can be held by passengers playing games. They sound a very loud horn for perhaps five seconds, after which the doors close HARD. I have never seen any one playing games with those doors. Another interesting fact is that such a simple system would reduce the cost of car maintenance by perhaps 50%. (Hard to believe but true; half the car maintenance in NYC is due to breakage of the door closing mechanism.)
5. My last suggestion was clearly indicated for the future--getting rid of the operators altogether by automating as on the seven-year-old Paris line 14. But this is the one everyone jumped on as being futuristic and impractical, especially on old lines.
Perhaps my respondents don't realize that the Paris system is just as old as ours. Almost surely they don't realize that the French are just as sick as we are of being exploited by the greedy train operators. As a result, they are engaged in a very-long-term program to upgrade cars and wayside electronics so that eventually all lines will be automated. Naturally, they don't publicize this, but my contacts at the highest levels of the RATP (their governing agency) told me this long ago.
Speaking of upgrading, the Paris subway has been improved over the years, unlike ours, so that the peak-hour headway is 90 seconds. Off-hours the headway is only four minutes or so. If signalling on the Lexington Avenue line (our busiest) were similarly upgraded and rolling stock added, the Second Avenue subway would not be needed. (Of course, lacking conductors, only half the additional labor is needed; on Metro-14-type lines, NO additional labor will be needed.)
I am disappointed that of my five specific suggestions, the four requiring no investment were almost ignored and everyone piled onto automation, the last. What is this spirit of pessimism that seems so pervasive in New York?
Incidentally, since I am a part-time Paris resident, I am aware that the RATP years ago signed a contract with the MTA to automate the TA's L line. I believe the work has been complete for some time. Does anyone know why it hasn't been put into operation? Perhaps fear of the TWU and its political allies?
The automation of the Canarsie Line (the L train) was completed, and the MTA began running one-person trains similar to those in Washington D.C. and elsewhere, with the motorman also serving as door operator on the eight-car (480-foot) trains. But the TWU and some consumer activists got a state district court judge to suspend the one person train operation, citing safety concerns after one of the new railcars built for the automates system moved briefly with its doors open.
As of Tuesday's strike, that's where the situation stands.
Whats the alternative to public transportation in a city?
Maybe one alternative is given to us by the current structure of the US Post Office: Your agency serves critical aspects of the public interest, and you will always answer to the government and be publically supported in some ways, but beyond that it's up to YOU to actually make a buck. Go forth and do business.
Ever notice that you can buy a surprisingly large assortment of "US Postal Service"-branded packaging products?
Ever notice that the Post Office provides a large assortment of custom stamp designs for the gotta-have-variety segment of the population?
Ever notice that the Post Office ships any non-oversized envelope or package as efficiently and price-competitively as UPS or FedEX?
Maybe there's a lesson in there for NYC public transportation, if the politicos would ever hear it. Severely curb the MTA's ability to aquire public cash, put loose-but-enforceable cielings on the fairs that can be charaged, warn them that they are responsible for their own financial future and can be replaced if they fail to provide reliable service...and then see just how quickly wage and benefit cuts, and automation, enter the picture.
Also, the flying pony that lays golden eggs, if you don't mind.
Well AZKSanders I'll address 1 & 2. These don't really look (to a layperson) like MTA's fault, so why would the MTA try to fix them...
My initial impression would be that the strikers, not the MTA have control over the timing of the strike (which seems obvious). Therefore, the Union is responsible for having a strike during Christmas. The strike's current coinciding with the contract end notwithstanding.
What I can't see is WTF they're thinking doing this. Screw up my getting to work for a couple days, mess up the traffic & economy a bit, I might take your side regarding pay disputes.
Stop me from getting home for Christmas and I don't give a good goddamn what problems you have, you could have waited, so **** you. Hence (I suspect) the number of people hoping that the MTA "goes Reagan" on them.
Well, that and the obivous followup. If they're stupid enough to do this now, they're stupid enouhg to do something at least this annoying and inconveient in the future, so remove them from the equation.
And a quick thought on #3. Who's to stop the new Union (for say busses) from joining a subway strike (or vice-versa) in a "show of solidarity". If the Unions decided to stick together to increase their bargaining power (which seems obviously beneficial) I don't see a real solution.
To Gekkobear:
Please re-read my original submission on Dec. 20. I explained my experience that, to a union membership, the date of a contract expiration is not a deal-breaker. So the MTA should have been able to get a June expiration instead of December. This is a matter of tactics and strategy in power struggles with unions; you'll have to take my word for it. I well remember the excruciating chices I had to make deciding whether to let the union idiots I was opposing cause my 30 years of work to go down the drain in a bankruptcy. And of course their jobs would go down the drain too but they didn't realize that because they "knew" the bosses always lie.
Unions do not generally strike in the middle of an existing contract. It opens them to huge liabilities for damages resulting from breaking a contract. What they do is falsely claim the strike occurred spontaneously--a so-called wildcat strike, so the union is not responsible. They usually strike "officially" only when there is no new contract arrived at and the old contract has expired. Then they are not breaking a contract. So your fear that a bus system union, if such existed, would casually strike in the middle of a contract, in a show of solidarity with the subway union, is really quite unrealistic. A separate bus system union and contract (with expiration date offset by many months) would be extremely valuable in dealing with the TWU. It would cut in less than half TWU's ability to bring the city to its knees by shutting down the subway.
AZKsanders:
I think that on a messageboard like this, sometimes people do not comment on a clearly good suggestion if all they can say is "I agree! Me too! Or at least it couldn't hurt." I guess they want to wait until they feel they can add something to the conversation. So if your suggestion is unambiguously good, or people recognize that they aren't qualified to comment on it, maybe they don't say anything. ;-)
Since you bring up the Paris subway, I wonder if there's any connection between the (lack of) conductors and other staff presence, and the crime levels in the train system? I tend to think of the conductorless Paris subways of having plenty of crime, but then I count pickpocketing and purse-snatching as crimes, when I ought to recognize that they are a nonviolent means of increasing equitability of wealth distribution.
Speaking of political problems, do you think it might be difficult in our more liability-lawsuit-conscious society to install Paris-style subway doors? This IS a society where some people can sue because a device works exactly as designed, documented, and marketed. So doors that close HARD after a warning horn might lead to lawsuits IMHO.
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