By Don Babwin
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
Copyright 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
CHICAGO — Even as the operator of a train that derailed and caught fire this week won praise for getting riders to safety, the president of his union said the practice of assigning a lone employee to a train puts those aboard at greater risk of injury.
“If the motorman was injured or trapped, what would the next alternative be?” asked Rick Harris of the Amalgamated Transit Union local 308. “What if someone was physically challenged in the car, in a wheelchair?”
But Frank Kruesi, president of the Chicago Transit Authority, dismissed the notion that riders in an emergency like Tuesday’s are not as safe as they were before the CTA stopped assigning a second employee to trains in the 1990s.
“The evacuation with this operator, everything that I’ve seen was much more smooth and much better than the evacuations that I saw when I first came here with two-person operations,” he said.
Kruesi said that operators are better trained today and that coordination between the CTA and emergency workers has improved.
As of Thursday afternoon, two passengers from Tuesday’s derailment remained in critical but stable condition at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Another five were in good or fair condition, and 11 had been discharged. One patient was in fair condition at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center.
The CTA is just one of the mass transit systems around the nation and world where the operator is alone, including those in the San Francisco Bay area, Washington and MetroLink in the St. Louis area. A big reason is that newer, automated systems don’t require a second employee, and there are systems, including some in airports, that don’t have employees on board.
“Certainly decades ago, when there were streetcars, there were conductors who would take fares,” said Greg Hull, safety and security director for the American Public Transportation Association. “It’s not just outdated, it’s a process that isn’t required in today’s operations.”
Linton Johnson, spokesman for Bay Area Rapid Transit, said there is an argument for manning trains with more than one employee. But, he said, “You walk a fine line between having enough people and (passengers) not being able to afford the service.”
Like other systems, Johnson said, BART routinely conducts evacuation drills with the fire departments where it operates.
New York is one city where a conductor is assigned to most trains. However, a spokesman for the transit agency, Charles Seaton, said conductors are not assigned for safety reasons but to open doors and make announcements.
Still, a conductor is helpful in emergencies, said a former transit detective.
“You can’t expect the operator to worry about his own responsibilities, handle the problems of the train . . . and get the people out of it,” said Mike Sapraicone, who spent 14 years as a transit detective.
In Chicago, passengers on the train that derailed and on a nearby train have complained they weren’t given adequate information about what to do or what was happening.
The CTA has defended the operator’s decision to help with the evacuation rather than power up the public address system, saying that would have taken time away from the evacuation.
Passengers ride Chicago’s Blue Line commuter train on Wednesday, a day after the line was shut down after a rush-hour derailment that sent scores to area hospitals.