It has everything to do with unions, specifically public-sector unions that shouldn't be allowed to exist anyway.
You can't expect the development and deployment of efficient automation in an environment where it's impossible to fire the existing human operators. Or where firing them would be just as expensive as keeping them around doing nothing useful.
First, public sector employees don’t deserve special rights everyone else doesn’t have. Second, public sector unions present unique problems privat sector unions do not. If a private sector union pushes too hard, the company goes out of business and everyone is out of work. If a public sector union pushes too hard, nothing happens—it can hold critical government services (often monopoly services) hostage until it gets whatever terms it wants.
If MTA were a private company, it would have gone bankrupt long ago. But we accept that public services should sometimes be subsidized at the public expense. That subsidy should go toward making the service cheaper and more available to the public. But public sector unions capture some of that subsidy to get higher pay and benefits for public sector workers than those workers would get in a private company.
> TFA explicitly states TWU wants to keep safety improvements. That's literally the job I would expect for a union. Safety is already worse in NYC than other areas.
You're actually going to accept the reasoning they give uncritically and at face value?
Of course they'll frame nearly everything in rhetoric of safety, because politically that's the equivalent "but think of the kids".
Of course, when you actually look at it, it's obvious that the TWU has spent the last several decades fighting actual safety improvements (including those that are SOP at the other Big Four systems), because their only interest is in protecting their members' jobs.
As linked elsewhere in this article, if the MTA tries to introduce newer and safer machinery, the TWU actually extracts a "technological advancement" fee to compensate them for the missed job opportunities, in an attempt to disincentive them from adopting new technology.
The TWU is literally putting passengers' lives at risk because their only goal is to extract as much money as possible from the MTA, and they don't actually care about the end state of the subway system.
> That question should be directed at you. It should be obvious this is a nuanced and complex issue. You accept what appears to be a one-sided view. Do you believe that should increase or decrease your trustworthiness?
I don't know where you get "one-sided" out of any of this. I responded to a claim that the problems in this article have nothing to do with unions, pointing out that the union for MTA workers has been the main driving force against solving the problems described in the article. Between the information in the article, the other information linked elsewhere in the comments here, and some basic Googling, that's all pretty easy to verify.
If anything is "one-sided", it's the original claim that I refuted.
> I'd like to know what's actually wrong in NYC so I can prevent the same in my own city.
Rampant corruption. The TWU isn't the only source of that corruption, but it's foolish to pretend they're not a significant part of it.
You can't expect the development and deployment of efficient automation in an environment where it's impossible to fire the existing human operators. Or where firing them would be just as expensive as keeping them around doing nothing useful.