Subways Chief Wants You To Know Exactly Why Your Train's Delayed

NEW YORK, NY — The new chief of New York City's subway system knows the MTA makes it hard to tell why commutes are messed up and wants to make it easier. Andy Byford, the president of New York City Transit, on Tuesday said he's reviewing how transit officials identify the causes of delays in an effort to paint a clearer picture of probelms on the rails.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority puts train delays in broad categories, such as "overcrowding" and "signal problems," that often don't clearly describe the underlying cause of the problem, Byford said.

The "overcrowding" label especially is "not particularly meaningful," he said. An investigation by The New York Times found the MTA attributed 11,000 more delays to crowded trains in March 2017 than in March 2015, even though there were 2 million fewer trips in the former month. When 1 trains swelled after a track fire blocked the A line last summer, officials chalked up the attendant delays to overcrowding, not the fire, the Times reported.

That's not how it should work, Byford said — delay reports should show the root cause of crowded trains or failing signals, not just the effect. Byford said he's working to give the MTA Board a clearer breakdown of what causes delays throughout the system.

"The critical thing about improving service on any transit system is understanding the underlying root cause of what is causing delay and not satisfying yourself with a big lump like overcrowding, for example, but understanding, what is it that’s either making your system unreliable or what is impeding progress?" Byford said at Tuesday's meeting of the MTA Board's New York City Transit Committee.

Byford's review comes as he tries to improve communication and transparency in his first month at the head of the agency that runs New York City's subways, buses and paratransit services. He's said that understanding the true causes of delays can help transit workers communicate more clearly with riders and help officials address problems more directly.

The MTA has specific guidelines for defining overcrowding, officials said at last month's board meeting. Each car on the numbered routes is supposed to hold up to 110 people, while cars on lettered lines can hold up to 170 people, MTA meeting minutes say.

The MTA has revamped its reports to emphasize what it calls "customer-focused" metrics, such as major problems that delay at least 50 trains. The agency launched a new online dashboard last summer that shows causes of those major incidents; overcrowding is not listed a category there.

MTA Chairman Joe Lhota's $836 million "Subway Action Plan" to stabilize the subways also aims to fix root causes like those Byford described, including signal issues and track fires.

Despite a recent shift toward better metrics, the MTA's overuse of the overcrowding category helped obscure the subway system's decline before the crisis hit its peak last summer, said Danny Pearlstein, a spokesman for the transit advocacy group Riders Alliance.

The "proof will be in the pudding" as to whether Byford's review yields more accurate figures on delays, and whether those figures lead to smarter spending and long-term funding to fix the system, Pearlstein said.

"Claiming that the system just can’t handle it is not an acceptable excuse when we know that the system is crumbling under our feet," he said.

(Lead image: New York City Transit President Andy Byford speaks at a ceremony on Feb. 9. Photo by Marc A. Hermann/MTA New York City Transit)