NEW YORK — On-time performance continues to improve on Metropolitan Transportation Authority rail operations, with New York City subways, Metro-North, and the Long Island Railroad all showing increases.
Subway on-time performance neared 80% in figures released on Sunday, the best on-time figure in more than half a decade. Weekday major incidents decreased 32% from a year earlier, matching the best figure since measurement began in 2015. The subways also reported positive figures compared to April 2018 for service delivered, additional platform time, additional train time, and customer journey time.
“These improvements were achieved thanks to our intense focus on investments in the system,” NYC Transit President Andy Byford said, “improving on the basics, and through the dedication of our 50,000-person workforce. I believe the best is yet to come as we continue to improve our operations, re-signal our system, and improve our decades old infrastructure.”
Helping the decrease in delays is a drop in the number of track debris fires, reflecting the introduction of new equipment in 2017. Platform-based mobile vacuums and vacuum trains picking up trash throughout the system have helped cut year-to-date debris fires to 81, compared with 133 at the same point in 2018.
Improvements on the MTA commuter railroads included Metro-North’s on-time performance in 2019 of almost 96%, 2% higher than the same period last year. Train cancellations have been reduced by 74% and trains delayed by more than 15 minutes were decreased by half.
The Long Island Rail Road’s on-time performance for April reached its highest level since October 2012. The number of LIRR trains that operated with fewer cars than normal has tumbled 21% in 2019, an indication of increased mechanical reliability of the rail car fleet. The mean distance between failures on trains also improved; in March, the most recent month for which data is available, the LIRR’s train cars logged an average of 208,687 miles before experiencing a mechanical failure, an improvement of 1.2% over a year ago.
More performance data is available here on the MTA website.
Penelope Vinson – The subway system is over a century old, but some parts are newer, and much infrastructure has been updated since then, but often decades ago.
New York City Transit President Andy Byford referred to the subway infrastructure as ‘decades old’. To be more accurate, it is a century old and well beyond just decades.