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 50Overreaction 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 decades, 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]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.[1] https://ggwash.org/view/62992/metro-kicks-the-automatic-trai....