Track Your NYC Subway Rage With The MTA's New Online Tool

NEW YORK, NY — The city's hilariously horrible (and at times, legitimately dangerous) Depression-era subway system likely won't start getting any less horrible until at least a year from now, Gov. Andrew Cuomo admitted last week. But in the meantime, the governor's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is offering a small bit of psychological relief and rage legitimization, if nothing else, as we the 5.5 million daily subway commuters ride out this dark age in NYC public transit.

The relief came right in time for rush hour Wednesday, in the form of a sleek new subway delay tracker, or "performance metric dashboard," now available on the MTA website. Click here to check it out.

For years, MTA officials have been pressed by transit (and transparency) advocates to upgrade their old method of 1) tracking train performance, and 2) sharing these stats with the public. Basically, up to now, they've been uploading months-old data — already based on questionable metrics, many critics say — to their website via huge, clunky PDFs a few days before each monthly board meeting.

Anyone who managed to dig up the stats in recent months could see they were rough. In July 2017, one in three subway trains were delayed — more than three times the delay rate five years ago.

Now, at least, the MTA's cringy subway stats will be calculated in a way that means something to riders. And better yet, they'll be easily accessible by all.

The new dashboard includes graphs showing "major incidents," "capacity provided" (aka, how full each train is), "customer wait time," "train travel time" (aka, how long trains may be stalled during transit), "station environment" and a few other metrics.

The dashboard is super hard to use on mobile, which is silly, seeing as that's where the majority of angry commuters will likely want to use it. It also only goes back a year — a little disingenuous, seeing as the system's been a wreck for at least that long. And it's got a two-month lag: The latest data is from July.

We'll be tinkering with the MTA's new tool some more today and feeling it up for its effectiveness. So check back for updates.

Lead image via MTA.info