NOT EVEN TRYING
MTA: Skeds, bah! As trains creep & riders gripe, chiefs fixate on ‘spacing’
IT’S NOT YOU, it’s them.
The MTA is slowing your subway roll. The agency blames it on the number of people who are taking the train these days. Riders, in other words, are just victims of the transit system’s success.
In fact, according to an internal report obtained exclusively by the Daily News, the problem is that the MTA is ignoring one of its most important performance measurements — the one about being on time.
“They’re not that worried about service,” a source familiar with the internal report said of agency brass. “They just think that it’s not really that bad. They’ve convinced themselves they don’t need to worry about abysmal ‘on-time performance.’ ”
There are a lot more problems than that — such as aging cars and track equipment, new cars that struggle to perform as well as well as older ones, and an ancient signaling system, with parts dating back to Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.
But the big one, according to the report, is asking subway crews to close up gaps between trains by slowing them down to a crawl, or speeding them up, or holding them in stations, or skipping stops altogether.
What they should be doing instead, the report says, is holding trains to the “on-time performance” standard, which means being no more than five minutes late to their last stop.
While on-time performance takes a backseat to trying to evenly space trains to close gaps, riders frequently will be told there’s “train traffic ahead” — a brushoff that can mean anything from a delay due to a sick passenger or a signal problem a borough away that’s rippling through the system. The amorphous phrase delivers practically no information, leaving already unimpressed riders more steamed and bewildered.
The internal report’s authors, an MTA senior director of performance analysis and two associate analysts, began by studying the mounting train delays and “the seeming impossibility of improving the numbers,” the report said.
What they found was what another source called the “caveman style” of train management, as in, “Me see gap, me hold train.”
Asked about the internal report, interim MTA Director Ronnie Hakim was having none of it.
“Just to be very clear, I’m not going to give credibility to a report that is not a formal NYC Transit position statement,” Hakim (photo) said.
She dismissed it as just another of the many white papers that get drafted at large organizations, though she also said she hadn’t read it.
MTA officials have shunned the on-time performance metric in order to focus on even spacing between trains. The brass has argued that few people ride to the end of the line.
The report authors beg to differ, writing that “we found no instances” that there were shorter gaps between trains by sacrificing on-time performance.
But critics say that misses the point: Keeping trains on schedule would cut down on passenger delays by increasing the number of trains on the tracks. They find it incomprehensible that the MTA would hold and slow down trains ad hoc, with the effect of reducing service instead of maximizing it.
“They’re not putting through as many trains as scheduled, and that’s a capacity reduction,” said Ellyn Shannon, assistant director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. “At a time when ridership is as high as it is, you need as much capacity as you can get.”
The issue has divided the MTA into camps, one saying service has to be evened out for passengers’ benefit, the other saying on-time performance would cut down on riders’ waiting time by letting the system run more trains.
According to the report, MTA officials actually have a “high level of interest” in simply eliminating “on-time performance” from the public operation reports they release every month.
Agency brass also want to loosen the station-to-station
scheduling standards, says the report, because they are “too stringent.”
That said, the subway system labors under a staggering workload — taking 51/2 million people on 8,200 trips in 585 trains over 700 miles of track — every single day.
It’s an $800 billion asset that takes billions more to service each year.
And staying on track would be easier if the tracks and the rest of the system were not so old.
Delays from track crews and planned maintenance on weekdays shot up 69% — to 12,034 incidents in March — from 2012.
In addition to the rise in regular maintenance and repairs, safety guidelines require that trains slow to 10 mph a third of a mile away from work zones.
Hakim and other officials say the priority has to be safety, but critics wonder if they value safety to a fault.
Soon after taking over NYC Transit in 2015, Hakim spotted a Department of Subways poster that read: Safety, Service, Speed, and Smiles.
“Why is speed on there?” she wanted to know.
Asked about that later, Hakim said, “It would concern me that people would feel pressure to be faster rather than to be safer.”
But critics argue there’s too little effort at the agency to find ways to put the “rapid” back in “rapid transit” without compromising safety. After years of surging ridership, passengers with other options are leaving the subway. There were nearly 6 million fewer riders in 2016 than in 2015, marking the first annual drop in trips since 2009. “They love to blame it on ridership,” one source said, “but now it’s getting harder and harder because the bottom-line number is down.” Critics also argue that fixing the subway’s signal system should come before station makeovers, which is one of Gov. Cuomo’s top transit priorities. “There’s a shift in the organization,” an NYC Transit source told The News. “They feel like if there’s better station settings, then riders will feel better.”
Cuomo spokesman Jon Weinstein rejected that, arguing there’s no trade-off between signal work and station upgrades.
“To suggest that modernizing signals and improving stations are an either-or choice is flat-out wrong,” Weinstein said. “The MTA is rebuilding stations and modernizing signals at the same time.”
But riders have been clamoring for better service over better lighting and Wi-Fi. Over the screech of aged wheels against decrepit tracks, there are the cries of waiting riders — people like Bronx student Madelin Perez, 24, who was stuck at the 149th St.-Grand Concourse station.
“There’s always something with the train — delays, crowds, homeless people sleeping on the seats,” she said. “If the train is running well, I can get to school in 25 minutes. But because there’s always something going on, I give myself an hour.”
Among scores of straphangers who shared their miseries with The News was Alicia Thomas, 34, a construction project manager who just needed a local C train to get home one night to her husband and 18-month-old son, who were waiting in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
“They’re not making any announcements,” she said. “They definitely need to do better than that. I’m very tired, and I need to get home to my son. This is not acceptable.”