(Photo : Getty Images/Alex Wong)
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 11: Guardian Angel Jose Ramos participates in a safety patrol on a subway train for preventing crime June 11, 2021 in New York, New York. The citizen law enforcement group, formed in 1979 to help combat violence and crime on the city’s subway system, had stepped up their patrol due to the rising number of hate crimes against Asian communities after the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the city last year.
The lack of MTA workers could thwart New York's campaign to lure workers back to offices. According to internal records, as around-the-clock services resume and workers switch back to commuting, New York's public transportation agency is struggling to man the trains.
NYC straphangers suffered delays as MTA officials scrambled to designate enough workers in the field to manage full subway service. Transit honchos and the MTA's official subway Twitter account explicitly indicated crew shortages as the root cause of long wait times on the A, B, C, N, Q, R, and W lines.
Dip in Number of Daily Subway Runs
The total of daily subway runs has dipped in the past few months due to worker shortages, which took such a huge toll. According to credible sources, MTA officials looked into the possibility of reducing service on a number of lines for the short term.
The train operator and conductor ranks have been stretched thinly by retirements, illness, and scarcity of new hires. Therefore, almost 4,200 one-way trips were canceled in December.
The MTA is operating a diminished workforce that has shed over 2,600 subway jobs since 2019. This left fewer employees to maintain a system to operate trains, grappling to recover from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last Wednesday marked a spike of more than 2.5 million trips, as indicated by official MTA statistics. However, transit dispatchers had to cancel a great amount of 114 scheduled trips due to the reason they could not find a person to drive. A shortage of subway conductors or operators forced the cancellation of 5,355 trains in the course of the first 18 days of June. It is over four times the number of canceled services in June last year, reported New York Post.
Delays were triggered on the 2, 3, 4, F, G, and L lines by issues ranging from disruptive riders to equipment failures. The dilemmas persisted throughout the day. This resulted in wait times of over 30 minutes on a number of lines as riders grew extremely impatient with the poor-quality service. This was a bad sign for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority as officials exhaust all possible efforts to bolster ridership. which remains down around 60%, reported Daily News.
In an interview, the Transport Workers Union Local 100 Vice President Eric Loegel said, "There's just not enough bodies. There's not enough qualified conductors and operators," per The City.
According to data obtained from internal New York City Transit "personnel strength," the total number of workers within the Department of Subways has diminished by almost 9% since January 2019. That was when there were nearly 30,000 employees on the payroll. Tower operators, track workers, dispatchers, and train crews are among those who have exited en masse in the past two years. Retirements, hiring freeze, and the coronavirus pandemic were great contributing factors in the drastic dip in the number of subway workers at the MTA.
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