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Comment by aurizon | Hacker News Reader

Make it fully automated, self driving, on controlled trackways with entry and exit on the opposite sides of cars.

Why? They do it with elevators don't they? I recall when all elevators had operators - yes a person in the car to push the floor button.

This evolved from old systems with a hand operated cable line with a window the operator put his hand into to pull up/down and to level the car. This led to elevator operator unions, and strikes - which led to fully automated push button elevators when the unions got whiney and greedy. Operators were getting $50,000+ for riding and pushing buttons. .

So the were all left out in the cold and courts supported automated elevators.

Then there were the movie projector operators, relics of the carbon arc in the old days. Now fully automated digital projection rules this work place,

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I do deliveries to some buildings that still have freight elevator operators, in a USA city.

I don't know what they are paid, but it is worth every penny for them to manage the elevators. There is not enough "supply" of freight elevator in most tall buildings, so these operators distribute the capacity to the dozens / hundreds of people needing to use the elevator each day.

$50k per year is a bargain for all the time they save for the thousands of deliveries and other uses each year.

If you have experience in this area, then I should not say this: it's easy to criticize some work as useless when one is totally ignorant of the problem space. But buildings don't hire these operators as a charity.

And I'd like to add that I am really skeptical of replacing this job with software, considering that facilities management in these buildings always seems to be barely holding it together.

I think a $50k employee can be more responsive / adaptable than a computer program whose administrative credentials are misplaced 2 weeks after installation. And probably cheaper, too.

Yes, I agree, freight management differs greatly from people walking in and pushing buttons for their floor.

We now have a new system where you go in and push what floor on an external pad and the system tells you what car to go to.

The BART system is designed to be fully automatic. However each train still has drivers. The reason is because of of other people. Here are a few instances where a human operator has been able to do things an automated system would struggle with.

Able bodied individuals weren't leaving the priority seating to make room for a disabled person. So the operator first reminded people to make room. After that failed he threatened to leave his cab and make someone leave their seat. A computer couldn't do that. At worst it could halt the train until the cops showed up, which would probably be a sub-optimal way to handle asshole passengers.

There was police activity causing a halt to all train service. As a result the operator manually connected their train with one that was already in the station so the passengers could leave.

Another situation involved a sick passenger. The paramedics forgot to alert the operator they had picked up the passenger, so the operator had to verify everything was taken care of before departing. In an emergency the paramedics may not have the time or ability to coordinate with central control or whoever oversees the system.

For working example, see Singapore. That being said automated systems still require maintenance and maintenance engineers could get unionized and still have similar impacts.

Singapore is also lucky in that the planners matched the routes with actual transit demand (not hard when it's a small island). I think the only realistic way that the US is going to have good public transit is when city operators allow privatized public transit. Singapore's lines, for example, until this year were privatized companies competing for contracts - one of the companies was nationalized, so who knows moving forward... But in any case, Singapore is the cleanest, fastest public transport system in the world, and is considerably cheaper than any in the US.

Mass transit is just like any other capital intensive fixed industry — they tend to go out of business a lot without implicit or explicit subsidy. Most of the New York City MTA system was built out of the ashes of defunct rail and bus companies that were devastated by inflation, bad business decisions, inability to handle maintenance costs or inability to raise capital.

Today most US mass transit is controlled by public authorities which are like a .gov/corporate hybrid.

Telecom has similar problems, but went a different route, where AT&T was able to secure a monopoly to build out the network in exchange for public utility status and some regulatory strings. Since privatization, telecom has gone back to that model to deliver long-term profit, gobbling up cable and media. Except this time they are dumping the public utility part.

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