Last night, I enjoyed one of those typical nights where the MTA communications network broke down. I was coming back home from the West 4th area to Park Slope and had hoped to take a B train. According to the MTA’s schedule, I had two B trains left to catch before the route shut down for the night, and all things being up to snuff, I would have had no problem.
Of course, things weren’t up to snuff. I wanted a few minutes past the scheduled B train arrival time, and the D showed up. Luckily, to coincide with the D train, an announcement noted that B service had stopped for the evening. The PA voice offered no reason for the shutdown, two trains and ten minutes earlier than it should have been, and it wasn’t until the D was crossing the Manhattan Bridge that I had a chance to learn of a “rail condition” impacting B and Q service.
Ironically, the first notification of a problem came via a tweet from OEM. The city’s Office of Emergency Management claimed that “normal B train service” had been restored following an “earlier rail condition.” That seemed to be at odds with Transit’s in-system announcement that B service had stopped for the evening, and I wasn’t about to wait around for 15 minutes trying to assess which agency was telling the truth. Something had happened, and passengers weren’t informed of the fact.
When I arrived at Pacific St., I just missed an IRT local train that could have taken me to Grand Army Plaza, and the countdown clocks told the story of a wait. The second train out was, properly, 12 minutes away, but the next train was still nine minutes away, approximately three minutes behind schedule. By the MTA’s own internal metrics that give trains five minutes of leeway, that next train was on time. By my own metrics, I was on the verge of waiting nine minutes for a train at 10:45 p.m. with another train just three minutes behind it. That is not good service.
Were this an isolated incident, I would be more willing to overlook it. Rail conditions happen. That’s the price we pay for a 24/7 underfunded system that features significant outdoor mileage. Yet, this is also a matter of information. I had to wait at West 4th St. for too long before any announcement concerning downtown express service filtered into the station, and even then, it conflicted with the most recent information I could access. Transit still hasn’t figured out a way to transmit real-time status alerts to customers who are in their system and have no access to cell service. That’s been a gripe of mine for years.
The headway problem is another issue entirely, and it’s one I see with increasing frequency along the IRT routes. At rush hour, there is often a six-minute gap between East Side express trains before two arrive nearly on top of each other. Late at night, when the downtown 3 makes only two stops before merging with the 2 line, these uneven headways are even less explicable, and yet, they happen all the time. The photo atop this post is an extreme example I observed two weekends ago.
Tiny operational efficiencies — better communication, regular headways, shorter waits — can lead to less agitated customers and a more pleasant commute. It’s often tough to realize that in a complex system, but later, it seems as though these small improvements are just flat-out missing.
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