Research on Subway Operators

When the New York State Legislature passed a bill (with only two votes against it) requiring subways to have at least two operators, the Transportation and Land Use program assembled a dataset of more than 400 transit lines around the world in the report, How Many People Does It Take to Operate a Train?, showing that only 6 percent of the lines in their dataset had two operators. The remaining 94 percent either had one operator or zero operators. This provided the MTA and Governor Hochul with a credible counternarrative to the one being pushed by proponents of the legislation.

The research was profiled in the New York Times, New York Daily News, and Spectrum News; advocates Citizens Budget Commission, Partnership for New York City, Regional Plan Association, and Reinvent Albany issued a letter supporting the report. Governor Hochul vetoed the bill before the close of 2025. Media coverage appeared in the New York Times, Gothamist, the New York Post, Railway Supply, Reason, and others; there has been no attempt to override the governor’s veto.

Read the Report

Read the Letter of Support