NYC subway: MetroCard glitch brings chaos

It was chaos. All over New York City people couldn’t buy MetroCards to get to work on the bus or the subway in the morning from July 28 to 30. Some 122,000 transactions on the MetroCard vending machines failed, and 20,000 riders had money deducted from their credit cards or bank accounts without getting a card.

One City University of New York worker told Workers World, “They took $81 out of my account but didn’t give me my card. I had to buy a single trip for $2. And next year these robbers are going to raise the fare again!”

The Metropolitan Transit Agency said the outages were only on July 28-29, but the NY Daily News reported major, but not systemwide, failures on July 30. The MTA’s vending card system averages one systemwide failure a month and about 800 service calls for its 2,245 machines a day.

This failure was massive. The crowds trying to buy MetroCards grew so large that at some stations the cops just opened the gates and let passengers in for free. The vending machines that accept cash ran out of change.

While 85 to 90 percent of U.S. workers use automobiles to get to their jobs, four of every five rush-hour commuters to New York City’s central business district depend on subways, buses and trains. New York is the only city in the United States where more than half of all households do not own a car. In Manhattan over 75 percent do not own a car compared with the national rate of only 8 percent.

Average weekday MTA ridership is over 8 million people. The MTA serves a population of 14.6 million people in a 5,000-square-mile area.

The recent outage problem was caused by failing programs on one of the computers that encrypts the transactions sent to the credit card companies and banks. This overloaded the other computer and caused the transactions to time out.

It took two days to figure out what had happened and then three hours to get the programs restarted. The MTA admitted it didn’t devote the “staff resources” or “technicians” needed to monitor the programs or document how to re-start the programs if they failed.

A far more accurate word for “staff resources” would be workers. Changing to MetroCards and vending machines replaced the thousands of workers who distributed, sold, collected and counted tokens with machines.

But while the MTA could replace most of the workers involved in collecting fares, they can’t replace them all. They still need workers to clean and repair the turnstiles that read the cards and to monitor and maintain their systems.

Also, in July, American Airline’s automated baggage system went down and AA didn’t have enough workers to manually sort the bags. Flights were canceled and thousands of passengers were told their only choice was to fly without their luggage or not fly. AA’s problem turned out to be their network, another automation tool that needs to be monitored and tuned by workers.

These problems with automation are not unique. Recently, London’s system went down and thousands of passengers had to replace their cards. The Chicago Transit Authority overcharged 400 riders in late July.

Automation can drastically slash the workforce, but it also makes the workers who remain much more critical.

The bottom line is: Bosses can’t run their economy without workers.