Lewis Lehe, writing on Medium:
Suppose there were some technology that rendered BART’s whole workforce unnecessary. Robots maybe. Or some super-efficient private contractor. The public would face a choice: we could lay off all the workers and use the savings to send trains more places, more frequently, and at a higher level of comfort and safety. Or we could carry on.
Using the technology would be unarguably worse for the workers…much, much worse than not receiving pay raises, because their current wages and benefits are so good they would have no chance to find anything similar anywhere else. But it would be much better for riders.
It’s not a stretch to assume we would make this decision without much ado. Voters would lay off the workers. Not because of some cost-benefit analysis about the gains to the riders against the losses of the workers, though. We would fire them all because making places accessible is what the system is for. It’s why we built it[.]
Just putting that out there.