MTA Brags About Subway Number It Once Called Irrelevant

NEW YORK — MTA officials on Monday boasted about big improvements in a measurement of subway service that the agency previously called irrelevant to riders' experiences.

The subway system's on-time performance rose significantly to 76.4 percent in February from just 61.7 percent in the same month last year, said Sally Librera, New York City Transit's senior vice president of subways. That's the share of trains that reached their terminals no more than five minutes late without skipping any planned stops.

The number is among several that MTA officials say show the beleaguered subway system is getting better. But when the agency rolled out a new subway performance dashboard in September 2017, it said on-time performance was not considered a "relevant" indicator of "customer experience."

On-time performance "provides a measure of trains arriving within the standard, and not a direct measure of customer travel time, particularly since relatively few customers travel all the way to the end of a line," according to the MTA's online dashboard.

The measurement is useful, but it's more relevant to the MTA's management and employees than to the New Yorkers who ride the trains, said Ben Fried, the communications director at TransitCenter.

"It’s an indication of reliability and whether the trains are coming when they’re expected to. It just doesn’t tell the full story," Fried said. "There are other measures that tell you how much time you’re actually saving compared to the same month last year."

Those would be the passenger wait time metrics, Fried said — which MTA brass say have also improved.

The average time subway customers waited on platforms was nine seconds closer to schedule this February compared with last February, an 11 percent improvement, Librera said. And the average wait time on trains was 25 seconds closer to schedule, or more than 27 percent better, she said.

"Those seconds add up," Librera said. "They add up to minutes, to hours, to time that people can spend with their families or their friends rather than waiting on platforms or riding on trains."

Weekday delays in February also fell 38.6 percent from the same month last year to 37,119 amid NYC Transit President Andy Byford's commitment to cutting 10,000 delays each month, according to the MTA. Byford doubled down on that pledge Monday, setting a new goal of reducing 18,000 delays a month starting in April.

Transit officials attributed the improvements in part to the $836 million Subway Action Plan,the short-term effort to stabilize the system that then-Chairman Joe Lhota announced in July 2017. Byford also cited his efforts to speed up trains and his "back to basics" approach to improving the system.

But there's currently no money for the MTA's capital plan due to start next year, which will be crucial to continuing the progress as it will revamp the aging signaling system and make other fixes, said MTA President Patrick Foye.

MTA officials used the good numbers to press for congestion pricing, a plan to help fund the cash-strapped agency by tolling vehicles entering Manhattan's core. Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have endorsed the idea.

"If we want to deliver world class transit for the world’s greatest city … you have to have that major investment," Byford said. "That is within our grasp, that’s the golden opportunity and that’s my pitch to legislators."