MTA canceled 10.7% of rush-hour subway service during August

The city’s subway service sank to a new low in August as the MTA continued to wrangle with a monthslong worker shortage that’s triggered some miserable commutes.

A lack of crews forced transit managers to cancel 10.7% of the agency’s scheduled rush-hour subway runs over the course of the month, according to data published Friday. That’s the highest rate of canceled trains for a calendar month since the Metropolitan Transportation Authority began publishing the metric online in January 2015.

Problems with subway service have piled up all year as the MTA has lost thousands of workers through attrition. NYC Transit’s subway service delivery department in July employed roughly 1,000 fewer people than before the pandemic, agency data show.

The pandemic — which killed at least 171 MTA workers and sickened thousands more — prompted many at the agency to retire.

But the shortage accelerated due to a hiring freeze put in place last year while transit leaders awaited Congress to pass a series of relief package that eventually sent a combined $14.5 billion to stabilize the agency’s finances.

Now the MTA is struggling to fill the hole, with irritating consequences for riders. The number of rush hour subway train cancellations in August exceeded any month during 2017, when service grew so unreliable that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency for the MTA and pushed a $836 million plan to quickly repair the system.

MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said the high rate of August train cancellations was made worse by the impact of Tropical Storm Henri and the Aug. 29 power outage that shut down roughly half the city’s subway lines.

Henri hit New York on a weekend, and the power outage occurred on a Sunday night. Donovan said lingering effects from those incidents impacted rush hour service, but he could not explain to what degree.

“We are accelerating our hiring and reducing training time to bring our workforce back to full strength as quickly as possible, cutting train operator training time by seven to eight weeks without sacrificing safety,” he said.

Donovan said crew availability was even worse in August “as members of the workforce take vacations,” and that the MTA continues to schedule 100% of prepandemic subway service despite carrying 52% of the riders.