This amusing video from Adam Sacks and some of his colleagues at the Upright Citizens Brigade has been making the rounds today. While the language gets a little colorful during the final 30 seconds, I love the idea of a bunch of frustrated commuters trying to coax a reticent into the station. After all, every New Yorker has had that experience where an incoming train faces red signals in full view of everyone waiting on the platform.
Setting aside the humor of an anthropomorphic shy train and a situation familiar to millions, subway delays are a huge problem. In its board materials yesterday, the MTA released statistics on delays, and the causes are diverse. Over-crowding and slowdowns caused by workers on the track lead the way along with right-of-way delays. Sick or unruly customers cause a large number of slowdowns as well. Of course, with nearly 5.4 million weekday riders, delays are bound to happen, but that doesn’t make them any less tolerable or annoying.
In fact, just yesterday morning when signals problems had the some East Side trains running up the West Side during the a.m. rush, I was reminded anew at how annoying delays can be. I got into Grand Army Plaza just as a 2 train pulled in, but then we sat. When we moved, we crawled due to “train traffic ahead of us.” It didn’t ultimately slow us down too much, but the perceived pace of the train led to irate groans throughout my subway car.
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have tried to put some weight behind those things that most irk transit users. Framing it as a way to study perception and behavioral adaptation to “unreliability” in public transit, three professors have submitted a paper of their findings. Only the beginning is available online for free, but Angie Schmitt at Streetsblog offers up a top line summary. So what are the factors that most annoy transit riders? Drumroll, please.
1. Delayed on board due to transit vehicles backed up or problems on the transit route downstream.
2. Experienced long wait at a transfer stop.
3. Missed departure due to wrong real-time information.
4. Unable to board or denied boarding due to crowding.
5. Delayed on board due to emergency or mechanical failure.
6. Experienced long wait at origin stop.
7. Ran to stop but the bus or train pulled away.
8. Delayed on board due to traffic.
Basically, these can be summarized as “delays” and “waits.” Now, it’s hardly insightful to say that transit riders don’t like to wait and they don’t want to be delayed. New Yorkers will love the subway if the trains showed up every 90 seconds 24 hours a day with no downstream problems ever, but that’s just not the way reality works. The real question is how to fix it.
The authors of the UC Berkeley study were focusing on the Bay Area with an eye on buses, but the same issues apply to subway systems too in a way. There, shared ROW traffic isn’t an issue, but the transit agency is still viewed as the culpable body when it’s their fault and also when it’s not. Is the answer patience? More frequent service that exceeds real demand but better aligns with rider expectations? Or are we too far down the rabbit hole to figure it out?
14 comments
Well, you have a few options, none of them cheap or easy:
– lobby the agency to relax its safety standards.
– install CBTC system-wide at an accelerated pace.
– downzone some dense areas in the CBD and upzone others near the ends of lines with mixed-use development to spread out demand.
– lower loading guidelines to give cover for providing more service where it is physically feasible.
The causes of delays vary depending on which part of the system you’re talking about, and the solutions will vary as well.
install CBTC system-wide at an accelerated pace.
Which is cheap by comparison. The corridors in most need of CBTC are the Queens Blvd, 8th Avenue, Brighton, and Broadway lines. Though, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Queens Blvd is next in line after the 7. There’s already a test circuit somewhere on the F. Although of course we’re still talking somewhere around 2016-2020 for that.
Maybe there can be some efforts to educate riders on how not to delay trains. Perhaps holding the door should be an automatic $200 fine?
In the places with the most significant delays, train lines are running at or above capacity. Transit lines have limits. Anyone ever noticed that transit is experiencing record ridership but hasn’t been expanded in decades? .
Perhaps you haven’t considered that rush hour trains are so crowded that people can’t get into the train the first time around?
Well,there really is no way we can stop the delays due to the mta’s faulty signal system. But the mta can at least try to stop delays on the f train for once
This is in 36th St and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, where the D and the N come together. It’s not uncommon to see one of them sit there in the tunnel for several minutes while waiting for the other one to finally appear and precede it into the station.
It’s one of those infuriating games the MTA plays, played out in full view of the ridership.
On hating to wait
Haha, tell me about that.
At Queens Plaza, rush hour E and M trains are all bunched up and crowded, while the R train on the other track is nearly empty by comparison.
This is a symptom of the train’s routing. 53rd Street is much more in the heart of midtown than 60th, so more people are looking to go there. People from stops between 36th and 65th (Queens) either use the M in the first place or switch between the E and the R at Queens Plaza.
Similarly, half the crowd from the N and Q exits at Lex, most of them transfering to the 4/5/6.
“trying to coax a reticent…”
“hesitant”. “reticent” means you don’t like to speak.
Check out the secondary definitions.
yeah, but look at the primary ones.
I am, and reticent used in this context is still an accepted usage of the word.
Stop being a grammar freak.