Nick of Time

mta_performance.jpgNYC subway weekday on-time performance, measured as the "percentage of trains that arrive at the terminal within 5 minutes of
the scheduled arrival time." Source: mta.info.

While we appear to be hurtling toward a future of less reliable transit service, at least those of us with cell phones will be able to plan accordingly:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) today launched an email and text messaging system that will notify registered customers of planned and unplanned service changes at any of the MTA’s family of transportation agencies… The system will be fully operational tomorrow morning.

Using the MTA’s website at www.mta.info, customers can register to receive alerts about any combination of subway lines, bus routes, rail lines, bridges or tunnels. They can choose to receive them 24/7, or only during a particular time of day or week.

Eat your heart out, Twitter.

  • k. geis

    This loads quickly, and is readable though inelegant.

  • Jeffrey W. Baker

    Why is it so much worse this year?

  • It’s not actually “so much worse” this year because the graph is slightly misleading, due to 0% being a huge distance from the bottom of the page. The average “on time” between the two years dropped from 93% to 91.5% — not that much of a change. One could put it more dramatically, saying that “21% more trains were late this year than last” (1 – (1-.915)/(1-.93)) but even then it’s nearly as big a change as this graph, on first glance, appears to show.

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