How 2 M.T.A. Decisions Pushed the Subway into Crisis
> After a 1995 collision of two trains on the Williamsburg Bridge killed a train operator and injured more than 50<p>Overreaction to safety incidents and inability to do cost-benefit analysis cripple American transit systems. DC's Metro, for example, was designed for trains to be driven automatically ("ATO"). In fact, they operated in automatic mode for <i>decades</i>, since the system was built in the 1970s. But in 2009, after nine people were killed in a collision, the system was disabled, and will remain disabled indefinitely.[1]<p>The result of disabling ATO is that what was previously a very smoothly running system has become a disaster, with human operators lurching into stations, then lurching some more to place the train correctly relative to the platform. Almost a million riders inconvenienced every day for a decade, just to avert recurrence of an incident that resulted in a handful of deaths in 30 years of operation.<p>[1] <a href="https://ggwash.org/view/62992/metro-kicks-the-automatic-train-operation-can-farther-down-the-road" rel="nofollow">https://ggwash.org/view/62992/metro-kicks-the-automatic-trai...</a>.