NEW YORK — Subway on-time performance continues to improve, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reported on Tuesday, with weekday on-time performance in October at 81.5%, a 15.9% improvement over October 2018 and the fifth straight month with on-time performance above 80 percent.
“I am very proud to see that subway performance continues to improve thanks to the hard work of our team and our unrelenting drive to get the basics right,” New York City Transit President Andy Byford said in a press release. “Improvements are the norm now, and I expect we will continue to get better results before we embark on the modernizations and upgrades in the next proposed MTA Capital Plan.”
The eight major subway lines all posted on-time figures over 80 percent; just one did so in October 2018. Other metrics of note included a reduction of major incidents causing delays from 52 to 44, a 15% improvement. More than 83% of riders completed their trips within five minutes of the scheduled time.
ERIC – Dittoes to you. I’ve ridden subways from London to San Francisco and it never occurred to me they have a “schedule”. Boston’s Green Line has trolleys running nose to tail; the “schedule” is if any of them manage to get through at all with crush loading at each stop.
JOHN I don’t have any data of any sort. My guess is just about any line in NYC is to capacity but since you ask about the eight major lines here’s my stab at it.
From what I know here are some of the major lines in Queens and Manhattan (I wouldn’t know Bronx or Brooklyn).
In Queens, all the ex-IND lines to central Queens or Jamaica and beyond are big deals. The 7-Train (ex-IRT) to Flushing is a big deal. Northern Queens is a populated area (and there’s the Mets baseball stadium and LaGuardia Airport) without a whole lot of subway lines. This is the only NYCTA line written up in TRAINS-MAGAZINE.
In Manhattan all the lines running north from Midtown to northern Manhattan are jammed. There’s the Lexington Avenue subway for Harlem and the Bronx that is greatly overloaded. Its ex-IRT twin on the west side under Broadway for Morningside Heights, Washington Heights and Inwood is a major player. And somewhere there’s an ex-IND line, is it under 8th Avenue?. The need for more capacity running to Harlem is of course reflected in the ghostly Second Avenue Subway, proposed in the 1960’s and a mile of it has been built.
All my years growing up, traveling by Amtrak all over the country, and making frequent use of subways in Mew York, DC, Chicago, I never knew that subways had a schedule. You just went to the platform and got on the next train…
What are considered “the eight major subway lines”?
I wonder how long this will last since it has been reported that the MTA will have deficits running in the billions for several years.