New York’s bill banning One-Person Train Operation
110 comments
·July 20, 2025Aurornis
steveBK123
MTA is already capable of OPTO on at least 2 lines (7 & L) and even ran a a train line (L) with it.. 20 years ago, but lost to the union.
https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1l3qcn3/nyc_in_200...
So a classic NYC problem of paying for upgrades to infra to support OPTO, and then not actually being able to use it, for "reasons".
stuaxo
New york has terrible infrastructure, I doubt there's level boarding so disabled people can get on without assistance.
In many countries one person operation can work on metro systems, but NY is probably about 50 years of investment behind in infrastructure before that's a good idea.
xcrunner529
Yep I can’t stand this disingenuous behavior. Really the trains should even be automated at this point. Chicago constantly has staffing issues so their service gets worse and worse and yet they insist on staying in the past.
jordanb
When Chicago got rid of the conductors, trains got slower and less reliable. If you've ever had to wait on the train while the operator has to come out of the cab to help a disabled person, respond to a door fault or call button, you've been delayed by one man train operation.
In fact every time the train stops and there's a noticable pause before the door opens, that is caused by the operator having to move from the driving controls to the door controls.
Jensson
Sounds like a bad train system. That has never happened in my experience where I live, and I used to take the subway everyday for over a decade.
gok
CTA stopped having conductors over 30 years ago. Peak ridership and performance was in 2012, decades after the move to OPTO.
bobthepanda
One could simply just buy trains that have door controls and driving controls in the same ergonomic layout. Other places have OPTO without these problems.
dmix
Does any of that have to do with the conductor?
Apreche
Crazy idea here. Why don’t we just have the best of both worlds?
We want trains to operate more reliably, and be computer operated with just one or zero humans on board. OK, let’s do that.
MTA employees don’t want to lose their livelihoods. That’s reasonable. I’m perfectly happy to pay them their existing salary and benefits to sit at home and do nothing. We won’t hire anyone new, and the job will eventually disappear. In the meantime, anyone who already has that job, congrats. Early retirement, paid in full. Enjoy the beach. We were going to spend that money on your salary anyway, so what does it matter? There are worse things to spend taxpayer money on.
pclmulqdq
If you don't hire anyone new, the MTA union gradually loses power. That's a big no-no in the eyes of the union. Make-work bills aren't about saving jobs, but about saving power.
gruez
You're not taking into account two factors: union bosses don't like it because it means their fiefs shrink. Politicians/parties don't like it because it denies them a captive voting bloc. They'd actually have to do stuff like walking the length of Manhattan to get elected, rather than securing the major voting blocs by making a few backroom deals with the top unions/business leaders.
TylerE
This is ridiculous conspiracy. A few thousand people in a city of millions is not a dominant voting bloc.
djankauskas
What matters is who votes in the Democratic primary, a pool that is usually much smaller than the total number of eligible voters.
null
lotsofpulp
Not at all. In local politics, government employee unions and their family members get their way many times because those are the people who show up to vote, including in the primaries.
Especially the cops/firefighters.
yoz-y
I’d much rather see these people being employed at the service level.
For example when automatic checkout machines came I thought “great, more people in the aisles that I can ask stuff”. Of course that never happened so now the reality is a queue of people waiting for a machine while three are blocked because nobody is there to help people.
onemoresoop
How about convert those jobs from train operators to bus operators and have more bus service from the same budget?
anonymousiam
In a sense, you are arguing in favor of a Fifth Amendment "taking", because the company (or government) loses money by being forced to pay people to do nothing.
No small business would tolerate being required to pay people to stay home, so why should taxpayers?
jordanb
Whenever I take the train at night I always sit in the front car because that's where the operator is and it's safer. Having trains with no MTA emlpoyees at all is not a way to have a safe and reliable transit system.
rPlayer6554
Why not pay someone specifically as a guard if that’s the aim? That way they can focus on security instead of having to operate the doors too. And they can handle unsafe situations.
Also NYC door operators are in their own cabin so they cannot really see the people anyways. They don’t have the training to do anything about an incident
franciscop
How do other cities around the world make this work and make it safe then?
DanHulton
Well, typically, they start with safer cities, something that's out of the purview if the MTA.
refurb
They could just change the drivers title to "Train attendants" like Vancouver does and their union will remain strong.
Spooky23
How will they farm overtime and become disabled at home?
cperciva
Meanwhile in more civilized places we have trains with zero staff on board, just remote monitoring (and trains which emergency stop if they lose contact with the control centre).
stuaxo
The DLR in London was like this, but reverted to being staffed for safety.
At some point kids chased another kid onto the tracks, was one incident.
ghostofdang
BART
jksflkjl3jk3
Trains are the easiest form of transportation for full automation. There shouldn't need to be any required staff on board.
setgree
On the Ethan Allen Express (Amtrak) I took this week, the boarding steps to the cars had to be manually deployed by train staff, along with a little step stool. When I got on, there were two people doing this, so only two train cars were boardable.
I think non-Americans underestimate our ability to not automate things that can clearly be automated through some combination of of inertia, union power, and sheer incompetence.
shermantanktop
It’s because Amtrak basically doesn’t matter. What’s amazing about this story is the ability of these make-work policies to survive in one of the most demanding urban transport systems. NYC baby.
readthenotes1
Isn't NYC the same place where the unions demand one person to unplug a monitor and another to move it 1 meter?
bhhaskin
Exactly. How can we have self driving cars before we have self driving trains?
tzs
There are quite a few self driving trains in service around the world [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...
barbazoo
Lots of places have self driving trains. Example: SkyTrain in Vancouver.
dv_dt
Trains are topographically easy but I would suspect hide deep reliability and logistical support challenges.
sothatsit
There are already many autonomous trains operating all over the world. They have centralised control centers to monitor them, and then maintenance crews that can travel to work on any malfunctions or breakdowns.
This is already happening in Paris, London, Copenhagen, Singapore, Tokyo, and many more places. They all still have staff that move around the network to work on things not related to driving the train though.
So, I think you're right in pointing out that they still need many people constantly monitoring and working on the trains. But they don't need a driver per train any more, and they especially don't need two drivers per train.
stuaxo
There are many semi autonomous.
To go full automous you want modern signaling, platform doors (which is hard if any platforms have curves), basically all the modern safety systems.
Here's Jago Hazzard (london train youtuber), on why the London underground won't go driverless.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Eh7-n5UAYs
While the LU is very old, the system is in a much better state than the NY subway, but it is still way to much work.
Terr_
The site's headline is ambiguous. At first I wondered if it was some weirdly premature bill against individualized automated travel-pods.
Instead, it's about requiring at least one "conductor" (separate from a driver) to be on every train. I feel the reasonableness of this varies depending on the route and how easily the driver can summon assistance without abandoning their post.
steveBK123
After 20 years of riding, I can assure you that no conductor on an MTA subway train is coming to save you if anything goes down, whether there are 0, 1, 2 or 10 of them on every train.
Ericson2314
I editted it to clarify. (I had started with the piece's original subtitle.)
Hope that helps!
benatkin
The "conductor" could be in a compartment completely separate from the passengers right? This doesn't sound anything like a NJ Transit or a Caltrain conductor.
o11c
Important note: this applies to city trains, which operate in a much more predictable environment than trains that cross large areas of the country.
Stevvo
Are you claiming that trains running outside cities are less suitable for one person operation? There is no evidence of that, plenty of trains around the world run both inside and outside cities with a single operator. There is also no evidence of a city being a "more predictable environment". Deaths are roughly equivalent; in the city it's people jumping on tracks intentionally, outside its drivers getting stuck on crossings.
yoz-y
There are many other problems.
A subway or city train stops every few minutes. This means that if somebody gets hurt, has a stroke, assaults somebody, starts shooting up… there is almost immediately a way to board more staff and handle the situation.
On a train with hours and tens or hundreds of kilometers between stops this is much less the case.
TylerE
More predictable maybe, but also way more intensive (only 30-60 seconds between trains, vs rural freight where many lines only see one or two trains per DAY, or even per week.
frosted-flakes
Are there are metro systems that run trains 30 seconds apart? I think the fastest is around 90 seconds.
Rarely used freight lines (aka branch lines) would never be automated, that wouldn't make sense. And some mainlines (I live near one) see as many as 4 100-car freight trains per hour. Those will never be less than one-man operation either, not least because at-grade crossings are everywhere.
o11c
If there's one thing we should know from the computer world, it is that doing something frequently makes it easier to automate.
protocolture
If people want one or two people in the loop on board commuter trains its fine by me. Really it should be a local/democratic decision.
Long haul freight trains however, should absolutely be exempt.
Ericson2314
It seems due to the way NY machine politics works, this was passed as a "freebee" to the union without considering the broader societal impact.
There are plenty of ways to improve productivity without firing train operators — simplest way is running more service in the existing network, and also expanding the network.
This evidently wasn't disgussed — and indeed the bill lies saying there is no fiscal impact. Hopefully Governor Hochul refuses to sign it.
protocolture
>It seems due to the way NY machine politics works, this was passed as a "freebee" to the union without considering the broader societal impact.
Yeah absolutely.
seanmcdirmid
> Long haul freight trains however, should absolutely be exempt.
We will see automated long haul freight trains eventually, as long as their is pressure to up safety requirements (human operators being the weakest link in that).
protocolture
IIRC we had a train get loose without operators in Western Australia and they just remotely derailed it, like it was nothing. Remote control would have been preferable, the incident demonstrated to me that the remote operators have the steel in their spine to destroy the companies money rather than risk human life.
AnotherGoodName
The article does state it only applies to the mta fwiw.
rmason
It took thirty years for railroads to overcome union opposition and remove the caboose on trains. That's because union rules specified a full time employee in the caboose.
tzs
> Labor costs are by far the single greatest expense in transit operations. This bill unnecessarily inflates these costs, ultimately shifting the burden onto riders through potential fare hikes or reducing the capacity for much-needed service improvements.
Couldn't they go ahead and put in automation for all the skilled work that the required second person would do if there were no automation, but make it so at each stop someone has to press a button to tell the automation to start?
They could then use minimum wage employees for the second person position. Would that be cheap enough to not be a significant burden?
kkysen
They already do this on lines with upgraded CBTC signaling. The train runs in ATO (Automatic Train Operation) in which the driver just pushes the start button at each station. So they tried to combine the driver and conductor into one position, but the union fought back and stopped it.
Also, they can't use minimum wage employees for the driver who just pushes a button because the union would throw a fit and might go on strike.
AngryData
Compared to the budget of running the trains themselves this seems like a drop in the bucket even if it is unnecessary so not really a big deal and people gotta eat. That said I think the more obvious solution to wanting or needing "busy work" with no actual purpose is instead UBI rather than requiring someone to stand around doing nothing 99.9% of the day to survive.
kkysen
Labor is by far the largest share of transit operating costs.
WhyNotHugo
I’m surprised to read that this is such a bad practice. Trains here in the Netherlands seem to always have two operators. I got the same impression of German trains.
Trams in Amsterdam even have two staff of board.
null
The headline is vague, but this is about increasing the requirements to two operators per train.
It’s a make-work bill designed to maximize the number of operators on the payroll. As the article explains, the justifications don’t really add up.
> This is revealed in the last sentence, claiming that OTPO would cause “further loss of jobs to NYC.” This bill is not about safety, but rather an unfunded program designed to protect one single job type from eventual obsolescence.
Single operator has proven to be completely fine around the world. Some are starting to move to zero operator. Bills like this are designed to keep the number of jobs high. Given the expense, it inevitably comes at a cost of reductions in service elsewhere. There is no free money.