>The L train is also the only line that uses modern >communications-based train control (CBTC), which allows >trains to operate in a more automated fashion. It's not "more automated fashion", it's fully automated, LIDAR and all - they are fully autonomous. L trains have operators because of unions throwing a fit and most of the times they sit there twiddling their thumbs.
I don't mind paying a man to sit at the head of the train even if they're autonomous. I also don't believe making all the lines CBTC are going to solve the core issues of breakdowns outside of an ancient signaling system. Some of the lines in NYC are still using R32 cars[1]. They were built in 1965 that is ludicrous. Granted, they were refurbished in the late 80s but that's still 30 years ago. That said most of the l…
New York is rich, but so is London. Based on that wealth, there is a certain amount of money New Yorkers are willing to pay for subway service. If it costs twice as much to do the same thing, half as much service will get purchased. (Indeed, it's worse. Crappier subway service reduces demand, which decreases the money available to fund it.)
Costs are the fundamental problem with the MTA (and D.C.'s WMATA), and those are union problems, not management problems. If it cost Lenovo twice as much to build the same laptop as Acer, Lenovo would simply cease to exist. Transit systems generally cannot go bankrupt for political reasons, but they can decline to a state of government-funded life support where nobody uses them except people who have no other choice. (See, e.g., the transit systems in most cities outside NYC/Chicago/DC/Boston). Consider:
> France’s unions are powerful, but Mr. Probst said they did not control project staffing. Isabelle Brochard of RATP, a state-owned company that operates the Paris Metro and is coordinating the Line 14 project, estimated there were 200 total workers on the job, each earning $60 per hour. The Second Avenue subway project employed about 700 workers, many making double that (although that included health insurance).
This is a large-scale problem in the U.S. Our public services suck, which means that they turn into safety nets instead of something that are broadly used by the population. In turn, people have limited willingness to fund them (because people naturally are less willing to spend money on safety nets versus something they also use and benefit from). Unions aren't the only reason for our public services sucking, but to the extent they drive costs out of alignment with what is the case in other countries, they're a big part of the problem. If you can buy less service with the same amount of investment, that's a problem.
One of the things that's happened in the last 30 years that nobody talks about is that Europe became far more market oriented, and their unions adapted. Anti-union rhetoric in the U.S. yielded a very different result, with most private unions dying out, and the public sector unions that survived remaining a bulwark of the "old way" of doing things.