Subway Back On Track: MTA Touts Best On-Time Performance In Years

NEW YORK – The subway is getting back on track and recorded its best on-time performance in more than six years last month, MTA brass bragged Thursday.

The agency claimed more than 80 percent of weekday trains ran on-time in June – the first time it's been that punctual since 2013 and up from just 58 percent in January last year.

The MTA is calling the achievement a "major milestone" – though the agency itself said the on-time metric was not considered a "relevant" indicator of "customer experience" when it was rolled out back in 2017.

Despite the relevance of the information, the findings point to improvements in a transit service that was considered to be close to crisis point recently. The number measures the amount of trains that reach the end of their lines no more than five minutes late and without skipping stops.

The improvement is being credited to the launch of the Subway Action Plan in 2017 which added MTA personnel and new tools for running the transit system.

“More than six months of sustained improvements show that our Subways team’s emphasis on the basics of service and our push to make strategic, institutional changes at every level through the Subway Action Plan is getting solid results that we are proud of,” said MTA Chairman Patrick Foye.

“Running a subway requires people with the right skills, the right mandate and the right focus to identify and eliminate root causes of delay,” said New York City Transit President Andy Byford.

Weekday major incidents on the system decreased 27.4 percent from June 2018, dropping from 62 to 45.

The MTA said those incidents include track debris fires, which have been reduced significantly since new vacuum trains were introduced in 2017 to pick up trash. The number of fires dropped from 410 to 280 in the past 12 months.