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New York City Transit is looking for a way to bring some of its older subway cars into the digital age.

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Michael Appleton for The New York Times

An LED sign providing travel information on a southbound E train.

The upgrade, if put into effect, would bring automated station announcements and digital route displays to more than 1,700 aging subway cars, including the entirety of the B, D, and Nos. 1, 3 and 7 lines.

Those amenities come standard on the system’s blue-hued modern trains. Currently, the most high-tech signage on a B train is a plastic roll sign operated via hand-crank.

To subway officials, intent on improving the passenger experience, the change would bring clearer, real-time travel information to riders tired of screechy intercoms and static maps.

But the end of live announcements could signal another step in the creeping dehumanization of a subway system already shedding station agents and, on some cars, train operators.

It was only a decade ago when the first futuristic new trains landed on the Lexington and Seventh Avenue lines, bearing a stiff, robotic oeuvre of automated announcements — the first time since 1904, when conductors called out “Step lively!” to boarding passengers, that a human did not inform fellow humans about a coming station.

“You hate to see the human element go out of these things,” said Harry Nugent, whose wordplay as a conductor on the No. 1 line earned him book offers and radio work. As his train lurched into a station, he was known to offer an invitation over the intercom: “Hey, you need a lift? I’m going uptown.”

Still, Mr. Nugent, now retired and still silver-tongued at 81, conceded that an automated system had its advantages.

“When I first started in the subway, I would have been delighted with that, because it would have been less pressure,” he said in an interview. “Conductors didn’t particularly enjoy making announcements, and as I used to say, the announcements they made were probably the equivalent of the graffiti on the side of the train.”

If passengers can better understand what is being said, he added, “well, that probably makes it easier all around.”

Few conductors today take a cue from Mr. Nugent and, say, describe the 66th Street station as “eight or nine feet beneath Broadway and probably an octave under Lincoln Center.”

And more often than not, subway conductors sound less than enthused about their monotonous task, delivering the requisite transfer options in a jumbled rush, equal parts impatience and boredom. And errors are, well, only human.

“I haven’t heard the robot make a mistake,” said Andrew Albert, chairman of the New York City Transit Riders Council. “I have heard the human make a mistake.”

Neither a timeline nor an estimated cost for the upgrade was available on Thursday, mostly because the transit agency still needs to determine if the idea is feasible.

Conductors who still make live announcements are constrained by a blue agency handbook, which lays out the dozen or so phrases they are allowed to say over the intercom. The guide once warned that there was “a very fine line between clever and obnoxious.”

Some riders, enjoying the amenities of more modern trains on Thursday, said they did not especially mind the changes.

“I would have nostalgia for the old way if it worked all the time,” said Vilian Ivantchev, 23, a guitarist and music student who has lived in the city since he was a teenager. “But sometimes you can’t hear it. The automation is always clear.”

 “This is more George Orwell,” Joel Leyden, 56, who was raised in the city, said on an uptown N train. “But as long as it works, that’s the bottom line.”

Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting.

Tags: Announcements