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China's subway system is World Class compared to NYC's [Copy link] 中文

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Post time 2015-3-8 10:16:34 |Display all floors

By one of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's measures, the total number of delays in 2014 increased an astonishing 45.6 percent over 2013. Even the MTA's less drastic numbers still point to slower service. More is at work here than meandering crowds of uncivilized cretins sullying the sacred shrine to transportation the the New York City subway once was. But the agency has no clear institutional explanation for the decline.

That 45.6 percent number is officially known as the "12-month average of the system number of terminal delays," and it comes from a report on the state of the subway in December 2014. A "terminal delay" occurs when a train arrives at its final station late, regardless of how long you might have had to wait for the train in the middle of its route. If one train is late to the last stop on its route, then that is one terminal delay.


The big increase in the number of terminal delays meant that on weekdays, the share of trains running late at the end of the line jumped from 18.1 percent in 2013 to 26 percent in 2014. And terminal delays tend to overstate the MTA's timeliness, because a train can make up lost time at the end of a route, where stations are emptier, even if it ran sluggishly through the busy parts of town. In discussing the numbers, an MTA spokesperson took time to clarify that the agency doesn't solely rely on terminal delays for judging its performance.


It's hard to directly compare New York's performance with that of other cities, many of which evaluate themselves using different metrics. The New York subway system is more than a century old, built out of multiple competing lines, and its passenger load and round-the-clock service create a singular set of stresses. When MTA chief Jay Walder left New York for Hong Kong's MTR system three years ago, he was jumping to a modern system that boasts a 99.9 percent on-time rate.

For reasons that aren't exactly clear, the MTA reports only break out the causes of a crappier commute when it discusses terminal delays, not wait assessment. So what's going on with terminal delays?

First off, MTA officials told the New York Post that the system is "still experiencing overall delays because of Superstorm Sandy damage and maintenance work that's part of the capital plan."

But that's not obvious from the data:

If maintenance and construction were behind the delays, we'd see the number of work equipment delays go up, and we have. But you'd think we'd also see an increase in the number of track worker delays. Yet from December 2013 to December 2014 track worker delays slightly decreased, from 6,475 to 6,304. Just as well, right-of-way delays (also called ROW delays, caused by malfunctions of switches, signals, and rails) are down from 9,802 delays to 8,594 delays.


The real increase appears to be from what the MTA is calling "over crowding," which saw delays more than double. In December 2013, over crowding caused 6,942 delays, but in December 2014 that more than doubled, to 14,843 delays.

In total, we've seen December delays jump 23,075 in 2012, right after Sandy, to 47,430 in 2014. You'd think those numbers would be chronologically reversed, but they aren't.

So far, the MTA hasn't been tripping over itself to provide explanations as to why the city's subway trains have suddenly gotten more packed than your average clown car. When I emailed, I received a response (which I've pasted in its entirety in a comment below) detailing the efforts over the past 10 years to protect workers, which is great, but it didn't make clear how that relates to the overcrowding issue. While increased delays can lead to overcrowding on trains, there's no evidence of a 1:1 correlation between this change and the overall overcrowding in the system.

The statement also included this tidbit, hinting that it's possibly all just a documentation issue:

If delays were up in total by only 5,000 a month, that explanation would make a lot of sense. They aren't, however; they're up by almost 11,000 per month.



But overcrowding should be less a cause of delays itself than a symptom of other issues. One reason for overcrowding might be increased ridership, but while ridership has reached new and unseen-before heights, it isn't up 113 percent to match the increase in overcrowding delays.

A second cause of overcrowding could be that trains themselves are being removed from service, yet an MTA spokesperson told me that they haven't been removing subway cars en masse, and despite an increase in mechanical failures among older sets of trains, the MTA has been replacing the decrepit with the shiny-and-new as soon as they've been able.

So we're still left with more questions than answers:
-Where are all these delays coming from?
-Why are they getting so much worse?

The MTA has said it'll take "further research" for more thorough explanations, but in the meantime, have a look at the reports yourselves.

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Post time 2015-3-8 10:17:59 |Display all floors
I ❤ NYC.

Arf, arf.

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