Real-Time Tracking Feature Coming in Q4, Which Is the Fourth Quarter of an Unspecified Year
MTA Announces New Subway App; App Does Not Show Where Trains Are
Read more satire at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Transportation Authority launched its redesigned official subway app Tuesday to considerable fanfare and a press conference featuring the MTA Chairman, the Deputy Mayor for Operations, and a promotional video set to upbeat music. The app, described as “the next generation of New York City transit experience,” does not show where trains currently are.
Real-time train tracking, the feature most requested by subway riders in every public survey conducted since 2019 and the feature that every third-party transit app in the city has provided for years, is “in active development” and expected in “Q4,” according to a press release that does not specify which year’s Q4.
What the App Does Do
The new app allows users to plan trips, view service alerts (which are issued after service disruptions rather than before, preserving the traditional New York subway experience of learning about a problem while standing in the middle of it), purchase MetroCards digitally, and access a map of the subway system.
The map is static. It shows the lines. It does not show the trains on the lines. When a user taps a station on the static map, they are shown the station’s scheduled service. Scheduled service and actual service on the New York City subway diverge regularly enough that the MTA’s own performance dashboard tracks the gap as a key metric.
Third-Party Apps Respond
The creators of Transit, Citymapper, and Google Maps — all of which already provide real-time train tracking using publicly available MTA data feeds — responded to the launch with a collective silence that spoke volumes, or possibly just had nothing to add. Transit’s social media team posted a screenshot of their own app’s real-time tracking feature alongside the caption “We’ll be here” and received 22,000 likes from New Yorkers who have been using Transit for years.
MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said the app represented “a significant investment in the rider experience” and that the real-time tracking feature would be “worth the wait.” He did not specify the wait duration.
The History
The MTA has been promising a comprehensive real-time tracking system for the subway since 2012, when a digital display upgrade programme was announced. Portions of the system — most of the numbered lines — do have functioning real-time tracking. The lettered lines, which serve a significant portion of the system, do not, because they use older signal infrastructure that does not support the technology without a significant capital programme that is, the MTA notes, “funded and underway,” which in MTA timelines means “in progress, no completion date confirmed.”
The Gothamist has covered every MTA app announcement since 2017. Its reporters could write the coverage template from memory at this point, which is a skill, though probably not the one they imagined when they entered journalism.
Everything about New York that makes it great and terrible, simultaneously: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full MTA feature list at https://prat.uk/.
The Tracking Problem in Historical Context
The MTA’s real-time tracking gap is not a technical mystery. The numbered lines — the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 — use Communications-Based Train Control, a modern signal system that generates the location data that third-party apps display. The lettered lines — A, C, E, B, D, F, M, G, J, Z, L, N, Q, R, W — use fixed-block signalling, a technology that is functionally indifferent to the individual train’s location, because it was designed to ensure safe spacing, not to tell an app where the F train is. Retrofitting these lines for CBTC is a multi-billion-dollar capital project that the MTA has been planning, funding, and beginning for years, with completion dates that have slipped repeatedly because infrastructure projects on a system that cannot be taken out of service for the duration of the work are genuinely difficult to execute.
This is a real explanation, and it is true, and it does not make it any less absurd that a city that put men on the moon in 1969 cannot tell a person on a platform in 2025 where the next G train is. The third-party apps have solved the customer-facing problem using the MTA’s own public data feeds, which means the information exists. The MTA simply does not display it in its own app, because displaying it requires building the feature, and building the feature has been, until now, not quite at the top of the priority list. The new app is the signal that it is now at the top of the priority list. The feature itself is coming in Q4. The MTA thanks you for your patience, which at this point has the character of a long-term relationship.
Further Observations
It is worth pausing to consider what this situation reveals about the broader landscape of public life in this part of the world. The gap between announcement and action, between framework and outcome, between what officials say at press conferences and what happens in the streets, is not a gap that emerges from malice or incompetence alone — though both play a role — but from a structural mismatch between the speed at which problems develop, the speed at which political credit is sought, and the speed at which institutional solutions can be implemented. Announcements are fast. Press conferences are fast. Reforms are slow, unglamorous, and require sustained attention across electoral cycles, which is precisely the kind of attention that political incentives do not reliably produce. The result is a particular kind of civic theatre in which the performance of action substitutes for action often enough that the distinction becomes blurred, and in which citizens develop a sophisticated dual consciousness: they know what is happening, they say what is appropriate to say, and they adapt their actual lives to the reality rather than the announcement. This is not cynicism. It is a form of intelligence developed under conditions where the alternative — taking every press conference at face value — would be functionally disabling.
What changes this, when it changes, is rarely the quality of the plan. It is the quality of the follow-through, which depends on political will, institutional capacity, funding continuity, and the kind of incremental, unsexy progress that does not generate press conferences but does, eventually, generate outcomes. The countries and cities that have transformed themselves — that have moved from announced frameworks to actual functioning systems — have done so through this mechanism: not better plans, but better execution of ordinary plans over long enough timelines that the compounding effect of sustained effort becomes visible. The framework is not the problem. What you do with it the morning after the press conference is the problem. Manila, like many cities, is still working this out.
Also: London satirists on Mastodon — https://mastodon.london/ap/users/116495249171626617/statuses/116756204739656003
SOURCE: Santa Claus