Gov. Hochul has until the end of the year to veto a stupid bill that never should have been passed that requires two-person crews on every subway train. Guv, ready your veto pen for whenever the spineless Legislature sends you this piece of dreck that has been rattling around the Capitol for 30 years.
The bill, to ban one-person train operation (OPTO) or even zero-person train operation (ZPTO) by mandating a motorman and a conductor on every train, goes back to 1995 when Transit Authority President Alan Kiepper was talking about the possibility about fully automating the L train when it was outfitted with Communications-Based Train Control (CBTC) eight years later, in 2003.
Transport Workers Union Local 100, then under President Damaso Seda, had allies in Albany write a bill mandating two-person train operation (TPTO). The bill, wrongly micromanaging and handcuffing the TA, went nowhere for three decades as Seda was succeeded by Willie James and then Roger Toussaint and then John Samuelsen and then Tony Utano and then Richard Davis and now John Chiarello.
But then this June the terrible TPTO bill suddenly passed both houses in Albany on a vote of 144 to zero in the Assembly and 57-2 in the Senate. The only dissenters were both upstate Republicans, Joe Griffo and Mark Walczyk, who understood how bad this was. Good for Griffo and Walczyk and shame on all the other members of the Legislature, including a Queens assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani, who voted yes.
The L (and also the No. 7) are now CBTC-compliant and could run without any humans at the switches, but still have crews of two on every train. There is no technological reason for this featherbedding, but it is part of the labor agreement with the TWU, as is another anachronism, of TA employees being the only workers anywhere that we’ve ever heard of where each member has his or her birthday off as a paid holiday.
TWU members do a fine job of running the subways and buses, but the MTA has to be able to modernize, as every other system on earth has done, safely and efficiently.
The Marron Institute at NYU looked at almost 300 subway lines around the world and pretty much only New York has more than one crew member on its trains. The norm everywhere else is driverless trains or a single operator. London, Paris, and Berlin are all older than New York’s subway and they don’t use two people. Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul carry more people than New York’s and they don’t require two dual crews. In this country, Boston, Chicago, D.C., Philly and L.A. all have one-person train operation (OPTO).
Marron found that two-person train operation (TPTO) exists only on one line in Toronto, four in Seoul, and five in Tokyo. But the other lines in Toronto have a single operator. The four in Seoul are a minority of the lines in the Korean capital. And in Tokyo those five TPTO lines are all switching to one-person train operation (OPTO). Nowhere is a law requiring double crews.
New York is already out of step with the rest of the country and the rest of the world by using two-person crews. Writing this wrong into law would be a huge step backwards.
Gov. Hochul, get ready for a big, fat veto, please.
