New timetable reflects actual performance, which experts call either honest or alarming depending on direction
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The On-Time Rate Reaches 100 Percent Via Arithmetic
NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced this week that subway on-time performance has reached an all-time high of ninety-four percent, a figure achieved through a revised definition of on-time that now includes trains arriving within eight minutes of the scheduled departure, extended from the previous five-minute window, and that measures performance at terminal stations rather than intermediate stops, where, officials acknowledge, the mathematics of catching up are more favourable.
MTA chair Janno Lieber said the new metrics reflect a more realistic assessment of urban transit performance benchmarks in a system of this complexity, which transit advocates translated as: they moved the goalposts and the train still barely made it through.
The Methodology Explained to the Satisfaction of No One
Under the revised framework, a train that was scheduled to arrive at 125th Street at 8:03am and arrived at 8:11am is on time. A train that skipped two stations due to signal issues but arrived at its terminal within the window is also on time. A train that ran express without announcement due to congestion and arrived early is on time. A train that ran twenty minutes late due to a sick passenger, which the MTA counts as an uncontrollable delay and excludes from the performance metric, is on time for the purposes of the metric, because it is not in the metric. The Gotham Gazette requested a copy of the full methodology document and received a PDF in which the relevant sections are formatted in a font size that requires a screen magnifier, which the MTA says is a design choice unrelated to legibility concerns.
Commuters Conduct Parallel Study
Riders on the 2/3 line between Brooklyn and Midtown conducted an informal parallel study this week, tracking their own arrival times against the posted schedule using their phones, which is what people do when they do not believe the official statistics, which is what people do on the 2/3 line. The study, posted on a community blog and shared eleven thousand times, found that trains ran within five minutes of schedule fifty-one percent of the time, within eight minutes sixty-eight percent of the time, and that the remaining thirty-two percent of journeys involved delays the participants described using language the blog’s moderator partially redacted.
The MTA reviewed the study and said it appreciated citizen engagement with transit data, that the sample size of one line over one week was insufficient for statistical conclusions, and that the official data reflects the full network over rolling quarters, which are always smoother than any individual’s worst week, which is the mathematical property that makes official statistics useful and individual experience irrelevant, which is why the statistics are official and the experience is a community blog. The community blog currently has more readers than the MTA’s own communications newsletter, a fact the authority noted before changing the subject.
The Capital Programme Awaits
Underlying the metrics debate is a capital reality that analysts describe as non-trivial: the subway system has approximately $55 billion in outstanding capital needs, according to the MTA’s own assessment, covering everything from the signal systems that delay the mayor every morning to the ventilation infrastructure that predates colour television. Governor Hochul’s office said the capital programme is a priority. Mayor Mamdani’s office said fixing signals is a precondition for any meaningful transit improvement. The signals at Roosevelt Avenue are still producing delays on the F, N, W, and 7. All parties agree this should change. The train to agreement remains delayed at the junction between agreement and funding, and the MTA has not announced when service will resume.
On Time, By Definition
The revised on-time standard has been quietly adopted by three other transit agencies following the MTA’s announcement, all of which cited the need to reflect real-world operating conditions in performance metrics, which is a way of saying that the old standards were producing bad numbers and the new standards are producing better numbers, which is an improvement in the numbers and not in the trains, which continue to operate under the same conditions regardless of how those conditions are classified. Riders, asked whether they feel the trains are more on time, answered with a consistency that the MTA described as ‘directionally challenging’ and that a third-party research firm contracted by the authority described as ‘no, universally no, across all demographics, lines, and time periods surveyed, with a margin of error of plus or minus three percent, which does not include the twelve percent of survey respondents who said they no longer care because they switched to the bus.’ The bus task force meets in August. The trains run when they run. The metric has improved. Something, in New York, is always better than it was, and something is always not, and the city runs on the gap between those two things, and always has, and probably always will.
Transit advocates have proposed an alternative metric they are calling Actual Time, which measures how long it takes a real passenger to travel a real distance at a real time of day, compared to how long it would take in a city whose transit system works. The MTA declined to adopt the metric, citing definitional challenges around what it means for a transit system to work, which is, advocates noted, an unusual position for a transit agency to take, and which suggests that the gap between the official metrics and the experienced reality is wider than the eight-minute window, and wider than the platform temperature gauge, and wider than the distance between the cooling centre and the subway platform, and is perhaps best understood not as a measurement problem but as a governance problem, which is what all transportation problems are, in New York, once you follow them to their source.
More civic absurdity at https://clickhole.com.
SOURCE: Satirical Journalism