TRAINING DAZE
MTA vets blame new-hire program for subway havoc
IT’S OLD SCHOOL versus new school at the MTA.
A group of veteran transit workers are griping that the MTA doesn’t give newly hired subway operators the same quality training they received years ago, leading to gaffes and screwups that delay rides and endanger straphangers.
“There are operators who constantly mess up because they just don’t know what they are doing,” said a Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker who asked not to be identified out of fear of being disciplined. “We all started out as new employees, but what we are seeing now is ridiculous.”
The sources said the foulups are inconveniencing riders and pointed to the last two weeks as the latest example.
Between Feb. 8 and Feb. 22, there were at least 13 incidents in which train operators messed up on the job, according to records obtained by the Daily News.
In five instances, operators overran platforms, forcing conductors to hit the emergency brake.
In two of those bad stops, a conductor had to open subway doors manually to ensure passengers exited only through cars that aligned with the platform.
In three other cases, operators were pulled from their shift because of the severity of the snafu.
On Feb. 18, a G line operator was taken off her train when she made a potentially fatal error by opening the wrong side of subway doors at the Court Square station in Queens.
In a Feb. 12 goof, an F train operator was sent for an ability-to-perform test after he went onto the wrong track near the Briarwood station in Queens. To get back onto the correct track, the operator had to return to the Jamaica train yard — with all the customers aboard. The foulup delayed four trains.
In another blunder, on Feb. 20, an operator was taken off the job after he allowed a No. 1 train to roll forward with the doors open at the Houston St. station in SoHo, endangering boarding passengers.
Of the 13 incidents, 11 involved train operators who had been hired in the past five years. The oldschool transit workers said that these 11 operators are part of a new generation of workers who didn’t get the same quality training that longtimers received.
The critics blame the New Train Operator Transition Program,
which was created in 2013 by the MTA’s vice president for service delivery to better handle growing class sizes.
NYC Transit needed to bring in more operators at the time because of a high attrition rate — the result of a hiring boom in the 1980s.
The new training program focuses on incremental learning. Trainees spend about two months in classes and in small groups working with an instructor in railyards.
Then comes the YX program, short for “Yard Extra,” in which trainees spend another two months in yards and terminals, practicing and being coached on different techniques such as starting and stopping trains and putting cars together. After the YX program, trainees head back to school, where they shadow seasoned operators for another one to two months and spend time on the subway lines, learning how to handle passenger trains.
Barry Greenblatt, the vice president who came up with the new training program, said the oldschool transit workers who are complaining are way off track.
He said new operators receive an A-plus education and far more training. “We added months of time to the entire experience,” Greenblatt told The News.
But the critics say the YX portion of the program doesn’t give trainees enough time to learn crucial realworld skills like starting and stopping at signals and stations. Before the YX program, trainees would learn the craft by spending at least three to four months in a contained railyard learning to start and stop.
“(Trainees) need more time with station stops to master their crafts,” one longtime operator told The News. “The YX program is a waste of time.”
Greenblatt, a longtime transit worker who previously worked as an operator, said he went through the old-school education. He said trainees back then would languish in the yards without any direction.
Still, critics of the new program also said many of the operators making mistakes on the job were hired through open tests and didn’t have prior transit experience.
In the past, the MTA filled operator positions mostly by promoting track workers or conductors, according to sources.
“The train operator job should only be promotional,” one source said. “It is a position that requires the people doing it to understand the (NYC Transit) culture. You get to understand the culture by starting in a less stressful position.”
The MTA said that no one was injured in the 13 incidents. It also said that the majority of current operators have previously worked in other transit positions. In 2017 two-thirds of new train operators were promoted to the job, the agency said.
The 11 operators who were hired in the past five years and had flubs in the past two weeks had no previous transit experience before they got their jobs.
Records show that they’ve made mistakes before. The G train operator, who was hired in March, had six other incidents between September and November. In one threeweek stretch, she accidentally pulled the emergency brake on her train on three separate occasions and overran stations twice.
The operator who allowed the No. 1 train to roll with doors open had four other gaffes in 2017, including two on the same ride on April 19. He was hired in September 2016.
MTA records show that the number of subway delays caused by transit workers — not just train operators but any agency employee — has increased by 24% in the past two years, to 20,385 in 2017 from 16,434 in 2016.
Meanwhile, the MTA said, employees of any kind were responsible for less than 3% of all delays in 2017.The MTA did not immediately have numbers for the amount of delays subway operators caused during that time.
However, it said the violation rate for probationary train operators has remained relatively low and consistent since the start of the training program in 2013.
“Our train operator training program is extremely successful and has helped increase the number of operators and deliver safe service over the course of more than 8,000 trips per day systemwide,” the agency said in a statement.