New York City Transit touts highest on-time performance in six years NEWSWIRE

NEW YORK – New York City Transit continues its subway performance improvements that have been achieved since the launch of the Subway Action Plan and the Save Safe Seconds campaign. Most notably, subway on-time performance hit 81.5% in June, the first time it’s been above 80% in almost six years. The program, launched by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and then MTA Chairman Joe Lhota, has provided a surge of additional union personnel, outside contractors, and new tools and methods for the maintaining and improving the system.

Overall subway performance continued its steady improvement in June 2019, with every weekday metric better than both June 2018 and the average of the past 12 months. On-time performance has continued to improve, and major incidents have declined to the lowest number since this record has been kept, and other customer-centric performance numbers are also pointing higher.

“More than six months of sustained improvements show that our Subways team’s emphasis on the basics of service and our push to make strategic, institutional changes at every level through the Subway Action Plan is getting solid results that we are proud of,” said MTA Chairman Patrick Foye. “And, with the passage of Central Business District Tolling through the leadership of Governor Cuomo, the best is yet to come.”

“Running a subway requires people with the right skills, the right mandate and the right focus to identify and eliminate root causes of delay,” said New York City Transit President Andy Byford. “I asked Sally and her team to focus on getting the basics right and to develop a campaign to complement the work already under way via the Subway Action Plan. Working with our union partners, our Save Safe Seconds campaign has safely speeded up service across the network with more improvements still to come.”

Weekday on-time performance for June was approximately 81.5%, the highest figure since August of 2013. Weekday major incidents decreased 27.4% from June 2018, dropping from 62 to 45 in June 2019. Furthermore, weekday train delays decreased 45.9% from last June, from 56,233 to 30,434, which is the lowest level of delays since September 2013.

Positive numbers were also realized in many of NYC Transit’s customer-focused metrics, including Service Delivered, Additional Platform Time, Additional Train Time, and Customer Journey Time Performance, as all metrics were better than one year ago and better than their average performance over the past 12 months. Specifically, Additional Train Time decreased to 47 seconds, a drop of 32.9% from last June, while Customer Journey Time Performance improved to 84.3%, the highest since this metric has been measured, and the latest figures on mean distance between failures of subway cars are in the process of being tabulated but are also expected to continue their months-long upward trend.