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Every major public transit system in the world has employee unions and most of those systems are a lot nicer than BART. The problem is that the United States i
by twblalock 4y ago
Every major public transit system in the world has employee unions and most of those systems are a lot nicer than BART.
The problem is that the United States is not good at building this sort of transit, and it's going to suck no matter how much money we spend and how much we pay the employees because the systems are not well designed or maintained.
- landemva 4y agoIn my limited experience with transit districts, they don't recruit high performers. It's a hang-out type of career, and they hire people like them. As far as mechanics keeping older machines running, what is described in the article is typical. It is old and is being replaced. Giving mechanics MS Win 11 to download log files via a recent OS doesn't improve the outcome.
- bluGill 4y agoIn most countries the union is reasonable to work with. For that matter in most counties management is reasonable to work with. In the us neither cares for anything but making themselves better at their expense of anything else.
- parkingrift 4y agoFeels pretty circular. It’s not the unions and it’s not the money. It’s the design and maintenance! Okay, but why would that be uniquely bad in America? The MTA in NYC spends about $19 billion per year. It’s hard to fathom that amount of spend, and equally hard to imagine how residents get so little for so much. https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/MTA-Top-100-2019.pdf https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/MTA-... A lot of people earning significantly over $200k. I’m sure all those OT hours are legit and necessary and not at all an obvious sign of corruption.