Subway performance hits six-year high
The subway isn’t as bad as it used to be.
More than 80% of weekday subway trains were on time last month — a six-year high for the embattled transit service — while straphangers are complaining less, officials announced Thursday.
“Every single metric we track was better than it was… a year ago,” MTA chairman Pat Foye told reporters Thursday morning.
“There are reams of data… that show just how much our subway system has improved in the last 18 months.”
The MTA defines a train as “on time” if it arrives within six minutes of its scheduled time.
Train delays decreased 45.9% compared with last June — from 56,233 down to 30,434 — while “major incidents” causing 50 or more delays dropped from 62 to 45.
Meanwhile, customer complaints are down year-over-year and satisfaction is up, the agency said.
Sixty-five percent of 12,000 riders surveyed in the second quarter of 2019 said they were satisfied with train service, up 3.8% from the first three months of the year.
Even satisfaction with the “number of unexpected delays” increased 4.3%.
“This is empirical evidence that customers are actually feeling those improved metrics,” said buses and subways boss Andy Byford.
“We’re still not satisfied. We know we have a long way to go,” he added.
Transit officials credited Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “Subway Action Plan” and Byford’s “Save Safe Seconds” signal retiming effort for the service improvements.
Since Cuomo’s program launched amid the delay-plagued 2017 “Summer of Hell” for commuters, the agency has stopped over 6,300 leaks, repaired nearly 25,000 track defects and cleaned over 55,000 street grates — among the root causes of track fires and signal problems — along with other repairs and upgrades, the MTA said.
Rider advocates celebrated the turnaround.
“Strong leadership at New York City Transit is once again showing real benefits for transit riders,” said Riders Alliance Policy and Communications Director Danny Pearlstein.
“These latest improvements show the MTA is capable of change and winning back New Yorkers’ trust.”
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