As NYC subway performance improves, ridership is increasing
Subway ridership has increased 4.5 percent since last year, the MTA says
The MTA has been taking steps to improve its infrastructure and performance over the last few years—and those efforts are, improbably enough, paying off. (Many of of those initiatives have been spearheaded by NYC Transit president Andy Byford, who reportedly resigned from his post a few weeks ago, but then reconsidered, according to Politico.)
This week, the transportation authority announced that subway on-time performance continues to improve and that ridership is up across the city’s subways, buses, Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), and Metro-North.
Subway weekday average ridership was 5.77 million in September, a 4.5 percent increase over the same month last year, while local bus ridership was 2.25 million, increasing 1.5 percent; LIRR ridership increased 2 percent; and Metro-North’s increased 1 percent.
“The MTA’s top priority is increasing the reliability of the system and our workforce has been focused on identifying and fixing track defects, fixing signals and switches, and overhauling train cars and buses at a faster rate than at any time in memory,” MTA Chairman Patrick Foye said in a statement.
On-time performance is also getting better on the subway: It was 82.7 percent in September, the fourth month in a row that it’s been over 80 percent in five years. Additionally, weekday major incidents have decreased nearly 28.9 percent since last year, getting to a record low of 32 incidents (last year there were 45), the MTA said.
The MTA attributes these improvements to the Save Safe Seconds initiative, the Subway Action Plan, and the Train Speed and Safety Task Force, among other things. But one of the main factors that contributed to improving on-time performance was reducing track debris fires (which are down by 31 percent since last year), clearing platforms at a faster rate with new “mobile vacs” that move around picking up trash, the transportation authority said.
Last month, the MTA unveiled a $51.5 billion 2020-2024 capital plan—the largest amount in the agency’s history—to improve the city’s transportation system. And back in July, the agency announced that for the first time since 2013, the subway’s on-time performance had surpassed 80 percent.
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