Red signals ahead

On July 25, 2017, with the subways in terrible shape, Gov. Cuomo’s MTA chairman, Joe Lhota, announced an $836 million action plan.

It’s a year later. The trains are still in terrible shape. Straphangers have no hair left to pull out.

Don’t pretend this has much to do with Mayor de Blasio withholding half the subway rescue cash for many months. Bad as that was, the state put up its half quickly, and the city’s share has been available for months now.

The TA has long collected monthly statistics, called key performance indicators. Let’s look.

Wait assessment, a measurement of whether a train arrives at your station when it’s is supposed to, was an abysmal 71.7% a year ago. It’s the same today.

On-time performance, meaning if a train makes it to its final stop when scheduled, is an atrocious 68%; that’s a few ticks up from a year ago.

A ways back, transitcrats claimed their own stats weren’t worth much paying attention to because they didn’t reflect a rider’s experience.

So they unveiled a new metric: “major incidents,” defined as when 50 or more trains are delayed on a weekday.

The MTA’s public dashboard says “such events cause the most disruption to customers.”

The months before the plan, there were an average of 77 of these giant messes a month. In the months after, they were down to 68 a month.

But a closer look over the past year shows the trend going the wrong way, with 59 incidents on average in the first six months after the plan’s unveiling and 78 on average in the second six months.

Shouldn’t those numbers be reversed?