WASHINGTON—Calling it a dangerous idea that could kill people, unionized workers who drive and work on D.C.’s Metro subway trains picketed in protest of the subway management’s plan to make those trains driverless.
And then, after their chanting and picketing on June 26 in front of Metro’s offices just south of the Mall, more than 100 members of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 marched inside to let the subway system’s board know just how dangerous the idea is.
Metro managers are floating the idea of driverless trains as one way to help close a $750 million budget gap for the fiscal year starting July 1. Their solutions include putting the cost on the backs of the workers, Recording Secretary Barry Wilson told People’s World.
That means cutting back bus routes and cutting employees, including subway station managers—and ending human drivers on Metro trains.
Metro management wants to put everything in the hands of “automatic train operation” (ATO), electronic technology. But even with that, things can and have gone wrong. That can be and has been fatal, warn Wilson, Local 689 President Raymond Jackson, and veteran mechanic Greg Bowen.
Wilson and Jackson told the story of subway train driver Jeanice McMillan, 42. On June 22, 2009, in the evening rush hour, her train, which was on the southbound Red Line outside its Fort Totten station, did not get an ATO signal that there was a train in the station ahead of it—until it was too late.
McMillan saw the train ahead, jammed on the emergency brakes, and “slowed her train down enough so that only nine people died,” including her, in the ensuing crash, Jackson says. Eighty were injured. The National Transportation Safety Board later discovered that the stopped train outside Fort Totten, which was rear-ended by McMillan’s train, was “invisible” because of a faulty ATO circuit.
“She was cut into three pieces,” Wilson says. “The hardest thing you have to do is to go tell a family that their mother’s not coming home.”
Had McMillan not been in the cab, he adds, the carnage would have been a lot worse.
Since that crash, all the trains have had human operators for the last 16 years. Now, Metro managers “want ATO on more and more lines as time goes on,” without the humans, President Jackson says.
“We have nothing against technology, but we have a problem when we remove the safety feature” of having an operator in the subway cab, he states. “You can’t take the human factor out of what we do.”
“Besides, I want to be able to go home and see my grandkids,” adds Jackson, a longtime mechanic.
And it’s not just the train operators and passengers who are in danger if the ATO system fails, says 20-year mechanic Greg Bowen, a longtime union shop steward and officer. He recently narrowly survived a near-miss as his team undertook massive track repair and replacement work on the Red Line at the stretch where train operators can now open up to their maximum of 75 mph.
“We’re not saying this could happen” to mechanics doing track repairs and replacement, Bowen adds, of a fatal accident. “We’re saying it has happened.”
After McMillan was killed, Metro greatly reduced maximum speeds on the subway. In work zones, the limit was 15 mph. But that limit’s gone by the boards, says Bowen. So too has a Metro requirement for the train operator to sound its horn when entering or leaving a tunnel or approaching a work repair and replacement zone.
The union gives that instruction to the operators, Bowen says. But not all have gotten the message, because Metro—like the federal workforce that rides it—is an open shop. Workers don’t have to join the local.
Except at switches and mergers, the entire Metro system is two tracks, side by side and often with no retaining walls between them. So workers repairing and replacing tracks are in danger, too, from operator-less trains.
Bowen was on a recent repair crew in the Red Line tunnel between the Grosvenor and Medical Center stations in suburban Montgomery County, Md. The train bore down on them at 75 mph on the adjacent track. They were seconds away from being hit. “It was very scary,” he says.
That peril could happen more and more in the next five years, the time period Metro’s budget and ridership forecasts cover, Bowen notes. That’s because Metro finally replaced its oldest subway cars with the newest ones, the much heavier 7000 series. They’re too heavy for most of the system’s rails—which means track replacement will be virtually constant.
Like other mass transit systems around the U.S., Metro faces a yawning budget gap. For example, the Chicago Regional Transit Authority, which runs buses, the El, subways, and commuter trains, calculates its gap at $771 million. ATU locals there lobbied the Illinois legislature to fill it, in return for cutting top-heavy management and making fares less complicated.
Illinois lawmakers didn’t pass the RTA money bill during their regular session, but could during an upcoming “veto session.” Meanwhile, management plans to lay off hundreds of workers and cut bus routes by 40%.
Chicago and Metro trail only New York in ridership. And all three are vital to the regional and national economy, as well as sources of well-paying union jobs, held largely by workers of color.
Several extra factors are involved in D.C.’s case. It lacks a dedicated tax revenue source, and thus is more dependent on rider fares than other systems are. Ridership has not completely recovered from being slammed by massive downtown closures, including those of federal offices, during the pandemic. Other revenue comes from the budgets of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, and Maryland’s finances in particular are now strapped.
“Like the Sword of Damocles, a lack of dedicated funding has hung over” Metro “since the first
Metrorail train ran in the early 1970s,” the union’s website says. “Now, with the budget crisis, it seems the sword has dangled lower and lower.
“One fact is unmistakably clear: If assertive action is not taken soon” by D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and the federal government, which also provides a share of Metro’s revenues, “the sword will fall, causing the system to fail.”
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