Subway Booths Have Gone Quiet. Time for the Agents to Step Out?

Nickel by nickel, dollar by dollar, token by token, billions in cash moved through bus fareboxes, subway turnstiles and station booths over the last century.

All that currency was handled by station agents who worked in armored kiosks around the clock, 365 days a year, part of a vast circuit of money that was broken with the introduction of the MetroCard in 1997.

Today, more than 83 percent of fares are sold by machines.

Despite dwindling tasks and urgent needs for workers elsewhere, New York City Transit still employs 2,660 agents to stand vigil in booths, at an annual cost in wages and benefits of $298.6 million.

Their continued presence is welcomed by many riders, and laws limit changes to staffing of stations.

But even as their original duties have shrunk, agents — once familiarly known as token clerks — have been assigned few significant new responsibilities for helping passengers get where they are going. Nearly all other major transit systems in the world have long since redeployed their ticket-sellers, but New York remains lodged in an archaic labor-management permafrost that poorly serves the public and creates insecurity for the workers.

Now, with the elimination of their remaining cash duties expected after a new fare system is introduced in the coming years, both management and the main transit union agree that the agents need to become more useful.

It’s not that there is any shortage of badly needed work, but most of it cannot be done behind the five layers of bulletproof glass and double-locked steel doors that were necessary to protect the agents from ruthless criminals who used guns, poisons and fire to rob them. Once outside the booths, the agents will have face-to-face engagement with New Yorkers, and their needs, demands and attitudes. Innovative training sessions began last month in a test.

More than new skills are needed. Encrusted work rules and bureaucratically fortified fiefs thwarted earlier reform efforts and continue to make change a complicated proposition.

By contract, agents in New York must remain in or near their booths because they are part of the stations department. Work rules do not permit them to carry out duties on platforms, which are under the control of the department of rapid transit operations.

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That means when a train pulls into a station with a sick passenger, the agent cannot escort the rider off. Instead, the train crew often must remain until medical help arrives. Sick passengers caused 2,747 significant delays on weekdays in October, transit records show — a new problem nearly every 10 minutes that might have been minimized if a transit worker not on the train had been available to help.

Instead, tens of thousands were delayed while agents stood by in station booths or on mezzanines.

Riders looking for real-time information about delays or diversions generally have to rely on announcements over spotty public address systems. To ask a station agent, passengers have to go to the booths outside the turnstiles because the agents generally do not go to the platforms.

Among the most critical short-term needs for reducing delays is for workers who can manage station chokepoints. With twice as many daily riders as 25 years ago, crowding is the immediate cause of thousands of delays.

Once a train’s “dwell time” in a station lasts longer than 30 seconds, it starts to fall behind schedule. Delays cascade backward. Even the most advanced signals cannot push service through stations where trains are held up by surges of riders.

The system has 129 “platform controllers” with crowd-control duties, and they are often outnumbered. “We’re popping off at the hinges,” said Derick Echevarria, a vice president with Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union.

Since November, a cadre of 40 clerks have joined a one-year pilot project tentatively called “Wayfinders.” They will be able to escort sick passengers from trains, and will carry tablets or radios to provide information.

“It’s something new, and we’re trying it because the program can have real benefits for riders and our employees alike,” said Veronique Hakim, the managing director of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Still, as employees of the stations department, the Wayfinders’ duties will not include direct crowd control duties on platforms, the domain of the rapid transit department.

Some agents and union dissidents believe the new positions encroach on work now done by conductors or others assigned to platforms. Mr. Echevarria said that the 2008-2009 recession, when hundreds of stations agents were laid off, showed their vulnerability.

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“We need to change, just like when any technology changes,” he said. “This is really about saving jobs.”

New roles, he said, could help stave off extinction of the 2,660 agent positions, already down from more than 4,000 in the 1980s.

“We can stay with sick customers,” Mr. Echevarria said. “We can facilitate real-time problems — we’ll be outside the booth, with tablets, radios, to give alternative directions.”

A powerful force in New York public affairs for more than a half-century, the transit union has seen the number of workers decline during the last 30 years. Labor costs have risen, primarily because of pension liabilities, but now consume a smaller share of the budget. Debt service has climbed.

New York City Transit paid $6.2 billion in wages and benefits for the 44,256 workers and bosses who operate the subways and buses. That works out to average compensation of $140,000, essentially the same as workers in city agencies, according to Jamison Dague, the director of infrastructure studies at the Citizens Budget Commission.

Station agents make an average of $112,930 annually in salary, overtime and benefits, said Tim Mulligan, the executive vice president of New York City Transit.

During an intense four-day training session this month for the Wayfinders, the agents were confronted with actors playing the roles of passengers who were variously belligerent, distressed, wheedling or flirtatious.

They discussed what postures to adopt, when to drop or mount a “transit mask” and how to create a psychic force field. One new Wayfinder, Angelita Bacchus, described routinely averting her head from taller passengers when they got excited. Some of them sprayed spit when speaking, she explained. Ms. Bacchus and others said they take the weight for problems they don’t control — not only poor train service, but defective MetroCards, or being unable to issue receipts for fare cards bought at the booth. “The M.T.A. needs to take a step into the future,” she said.

Jennifer Walcott, an agent supervisor, was impressed. “They never had any of this training when I came on,” she said.

New York, Mr. Echevarria said, had fallen behind other great transit cities.

“We should be innovative, moving forward,” he said. “Not be following or taking direction from England or Germany.”