TIME FOR THE TRUTH
MTA changes its regs so it looks like fewer trains are late
City transit honchos have used questionable statistics to persuade straphangers and lawmakers of major improvements in subway performance, a Daily News analysis of internal subway data found.
Subway planners have since 2018 added more minutes to scheduled run times on some subway lines — changes that made it easier for trains to complete trips on time and thus improve the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s data about the subway’s on-time performance.
Agency officials reported 83% of weekday trains ran on time in January, a sharp increase from the same month in 2018, when on-time performance bottomed out at 58%.
Unsaid in the claims of improvement is that the minutes added to train schedules have had a big impact on the MTA’s performance metrics.
For example, early in 2018 the MTA gave evening rush hour No. 4 trains an average of 66 minutes to complete their runs between the Woodlawn station in the Bronx and Utica Ave. in Brooklyn.
But by the summer of 2018, those same trains were given an average of 71 minutes to get from end to end, the News analysis found.
The line’s on-time performance improved — 66% of weekday No. 4 trains were reported “on time” in January 2019, a drastic increase from the 38% the MTA reported in January 2018.
During the same period, weekday No. 2 and No. 3 trains were given about three extra minutes to finish their runs.
Midday No. 5 trains got an extra five minutes.
Thanks in part to the schedule changes, the three lines’ on-time performance improved. Their combined performance rose from 45% in January 2018 to 76% in January 2019.
The tweaks continued on the subway’s lettered lines last year.
In November 2019, F trains during the morning rush were given as much as four extra minutes to finish their runs. The on-time performance on the F line ticked up from 68% in October — the month before the change — to 72% in January.
At the MTA, on-time performance measures the percentage of trains that complete a trip from the end of a subway line to the other within five minutes of their scheduled run time.
Experts say the metric doesn’t showcase riders’ actual experience on the subway because very few passengers ride a subway line from end to end.
“I’d say that it [on-time performance] is good as an internal metric, but it’s bad when you’re trying to measure the impact of something on passengers,” said Adam Rahbee, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-schooled transit researcher and consultant.
Still, MTA officials said they had good reason to tweak the schedules.
The additional time makes it easier to manage subway service, said Sally Librera, senior vice president of subways at NYC Transit. If a train regularly runs behind schedule in one direction, it is hard for subway supervisors and crews to turn it around and provide reliable service in the other direction.
“Having schedules that are realistic is very important,” said Librera, adding
that subway service is most reliable when the MTA sticks to a very precise “playbook.”
Rahbee, who’s audited subway schedules in cities like London and Chicago, agreed that the schedule changes on New York’s subways have had a positive impact on service — but also noted they have the added benefit of juicing the MTA’s stats.
The extra minutes are “a lot as far as running time goes,” Rahbee said.
Librera said a recent surge of track and signal maintenance — including a program called “Save Safe Seconds” that has fixed faulty subway signal equipment over the last year — has had a bigger impact on performance metrics than the changes to the schedule.
She also noted that the MTA reports on a variety of statistics that as a whole paint a more accurate picture of riders’ experience.
But agency heads have over the last year leaned on the shaky on-time performance metric to show their success.
“On-time performance is up about 30% year over year,” MTA Chairman Patrick Foye told state senators last March in a confirmation hearing for his current job.
A month earlier, Foye and former MTA managing director Ronnie Hakim cited the increased figures as proof they could be trusted to run the agency — but warned that subway fares would increase to $3.50 for a single ride and $154 for a monthly pass if the agency did not get additional funding.
And in November, Foye used the statistic in a hearing with state lawmakers to push for funding for the agency’s $51.5 billion 2020-2024 capital plan.
“Our weekday on-time performance continues to improve, going up to nearly 83% in September 2019,” Foye said at the hearing. “Preliminary data shows that October will continue that positive trend, with subway ontime performance at 81.5%.”
Rahbee said a metric called “customer journey time,” which calculates the percentage of straphangers who are no more than five minutes late to arrive at their final stop, gives a more honest depiction of the subway’s performance.
Foye would not have impressed lawmakers had he touted the more nuanced statistic. Roughly 75% of passengers made it to their destination on time in January 2018. The metric increased slightly to 81% the following June, but has remained relatively flat since.
Transit officials recently began to change their ways, though.
At an NYC Transit committee meeting in February, Librera highlighted that peak running times improved on every line from 2018 to 2019, which she said was a good measure of straphangers’ commutes.
“On-time performance is based on how we deliver relative to our schedule,” she said. “These numbers … are different in that they are straight actual run times year over year.
“These [run times] are an absolute comparison of how fast trains are running this year versus how fast they were running a year ago.”