MTA Is Doing Great, MTA Says

NEW YORK CITY — Barring plummeting rusty subway bolts, collapsing station roofs and mystery gassy stenches, the MTA did a great job this year, says the MTA.

An on-time performance measurement — which they have in past described as irrelevant to riders — and a new running time metric that champions the snow-addled 7 as its "biggest success" show service has improved significantly since 2018, the MTA boasted Monday.

“The data doesn't lie,” said MTA Chairman and CEO Patrick Foye. “Our subway service has truly turned around.”

The 7 trains saw the biggest running time improvement on any line with speeds up about 3.5 minutes faster on the local and 4.5 minutes faster on the express, according to the MTA.

Running times are a recently introduced metric MTA NYC Transit President Andy Byford championed as a "meaningful way to quantify ... months of sustained improvement in service.”

The MTA noted the 7 lines recently received a signal system upgrade, a component of which recently went haywire in snow, caused massive delays, and left Byford fuming.

Byford said of the communications-based train control transponders, provided by a private contractor, that failed, "This failure is wholly inexcusable."

Numbered lines were running about two and a half minutes faster than last year and lettered lines were running about one and a half minutes faster than 2018, the MTA data show.

MTA officials also celebrated improvements in the the subway system's on-time performance, a metric the agency did not consider a "relevant" indicator of "customer experience" when it rolled out its new subway performance dashboard in September 2017.

On-time performance — or the share of trains reaching their terminals no more than five minutes — rose to 81.8 percent in November from just 69.9 percent in the same month last year, according to the MTA.

Finally, MTA officials noted there were only an average of 34 weekday major incidents and 29,863 weekday train delays last month as opposed to 67 weekday major incidents and 51,96 delays in November 2018.