The city’s first computerized subway train has been heralded as the future of a system able to track every train’s movement down to the minute it enters the station. The new L train, expected to make its debut in July, is also seen as the future of the conductorless train.

A more precise and efficient subway system has few detractors. Removing the conductors, though they sometimes mumble announcements and wear funny-looking protective eyewear, has become a political issue defined by the word “automation.” Along with the planned removal of the subway’s token-booth clerks, the innovation has been criticized as potentially endangering passengers as well as costing jobs.

All seven members of the City Council’s Committee on Transportation who were present at a meeting yesterday – four members were not – voted in favor of a resolution calling for most trains to have at least one operator and one conductor. The resolution is almost identical to a bill introduced recently by 30 Albany legislators.

Critics of the conductorless train argue that every train should have a crew of at least two, in case of an evacuation.

“More and more automation gives us great concern,” the committee chairman, John Liu, Democrat of Queens, said. “We do not want more efficiency at the expense of safety to passengers and the safety of workers.”

Normal service on the L, which runs between Canarsie and 14th Street at Eighth Avenue, is being suspended between midnight and 5 a.m. for the next four months to bring the computerized trains on line in July. The new L will be the city’s first line to operate full-time without a conductor. Since 1996, New York City Transit has slowly phased in conductorless trains on all the city’s shuttle lines – such as the Times Square shuttle that derailed in Grand Central Terminal early Monday morning – as well as the G line on weekends.

A spokesman for New York City Transit said that safety of conductorless trains is not an issue and that a train operator and conductor are not expected to evacuate a train on their own.

“We did a great deal of study on one-person trains,” the spokesman, Charles Seaton, said.

The last evacuation in recent memory was during the blackout of August 2003.

The four representatives of the mayor on the board of the state-controlled MTA are reviewing the issue, a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, Jordan Barowitz, said.

Members of the Transit Workers Union local applauded the vote yesterday. Transit workers fear removing train conductors will lead to job cuts. Transit officials have said that no jobs will be lost through the automation of the L line because the approximately 150 conductors on the L will be reassigned to other duties. Of the 34,000 MTA workers in the union, 3,000 work as subway conductors.