New York City Transit

Well over 40 percent of all fare-jumpers are children taller than 44 inches who duck under turnstiles anyway, the MTA unveiled yesterday in an unofficial study. The Daily News has more, including some choice quotes from parents:

Kids taller than 44 inches – the height limit for a free ride – made up 43% of fare-beaters observed by NYC Transit surveyors last year, an agency staff report says. The “predominant mode of evasion is children over 44 inches ducking under turnstiles,” the report says.

The surveyors noted that a subway surveillance camera even spotted a young boy enter without paying – and then open an emergency exit gate from the inside so his stroller-pushing mother could also ride free. The lost revenue from the pint-size scofflaws is not small change. It costs the agency millions of dollars a year, the report says.

Some parents told the Daily News Tuesday they had no qualms about beating the system. “The MTA’s dumb. … As long as they don’t enforce it, we’ll keep doing it,” west Harlem mom Janet Carrion, 42, said. Carrion, who works as a baby-sitter, doesn’t pay for her own boys, ages 8 and 9, to ride the subway. “We pay for every little thing, and the fare is too expensive to begin with,” she said. “I don’t feel guilty.”

Store clerk Aricellis Maldonado, 28, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, never pays for her 9-year-old son, who is about 2 inches over the limit. “No one’s ever stopped me, and until they do, we’ll keep doing this,” Maldonado said.

I’m going to start trying that with my half-gallon of milk. I pay for everything else at the grocery store even though I think the prices are getting too high. I won’t feel guilty about stealing some milk. I hope Key Food agrees with me.

The News says that evasion rates peak at around 3 p.m. when kids get let out of school, and the MTA is considering placing signs near turnstiles to remind straphangers of the height restrictions. Currently, those are buried only on the MTA’s website. Meanwhile, other findings included 24 percent who walked through exit gates and 32 percent who engaged in good old fashioned turnstile jumping or went through with two riders on one swipe.

Of course, combatting these pint-sized fare-jumpers is a bit of a challenge. The MTA can’t start ticketing 10-year-olds, but all it would take are a few high-profile PR incidents to get parents to start swiping through. The captured revenue from fare jumpers wouldn’t be insignificant.

When the MTA releases their annual breakdown of subway ridership by station, I tend to spend far too much time playing with these numbers. The new figures came out yesterday and are available here on the MTA’s website and here as a sortable Excel file. It is the stuff of what data dreams are made of.

We begin with the system’s most popular stations, and we see a newcomer in our midst. With construction impacting Fulton St., it slips to 11, and a Queens station — the Flushing-Main St. terminal along the 7 — enters the top ten. Considering how only one train services Flushing, that it cracks the top ten speaks volumes of that area’s growth. As good as the soup dumplings are, I don’t think 18.6 million folks are heading home from Joe’s Shanghai.

The least popular stations too don’t often change that much. More people pass through Times Square in a day than visit the Aqueduct Racetrack all year, and the stations in the Rockaways don’t see much traffic in good times. That many were closed for renovations last year depresses ridership even further. Whitlock Ave. and East 143rd Sts. crack the list because they too were shuttered for renovations for much of 2010.

Not listed here is 21st St. on the G train. It wasn’t closed for construction last year and was just the 11th least used station in all four boroughs. Fewer than 320,000 straphangers passed through the station that is clearly visible from the G’s northern terminus at Court Square.

While pure numbers validate our belief that one station is crowded while another is less so, the percentages are more interesting to explore. Has one station become more popular than another? If so, why? By and large, the ones listed in the top 10 became more popular because those nearby were closed. That’s why a bunch of stations along the 6 in the Bronx, the A in the Rockaways and the Brighton Line in Brooklyn saw big increases in ridership last year.

Only one station along the L line — Morgan Ave. with 20 percent growth — made the top ten cut, but the rest of the L train stations throughout Williamsburg and east into Bushwick showed strong across-the-board growth. Michael Grynbaum speculated that gentrification is the cause of the uptick in ridership. Bedford Ave. is now the 46th most popular station around. Of note too was the West 8th St./New York Aquarium stop which saw an increase in straphangers of over 11 percent.

And finally, we arrive at the losers. Below are the top ten stations that saw major declines in ridership. For this chart, I omitted most of the shuttered stations along the 6 and A because the declines were drastic. Whitlock Ave. was closed for most of 2010, and it saw ridership drop by 66 percent. If the turnstiles aren’t on and the trains aren’t stopping, it’s going to be hard for passengers to find their ways on board.

The remaining declines paint an interesting picture of a train in trouble. Many of the G train stations are bleeding passengers, and it’s hard to explain why. Broadway, for instance, saw a 10 percent dip in ridership. Maybe more straphangers who would have ridden the G to Court Square to transfer to the E simply find it convenient to take the M into Midtown. Myrtle-Willoughby and Nassau Ave. too though are losing passengers at a brisk rate.

Other stations can trace their declining numbers to the service cuts. With M trains no longer heading throughLower Manhattan and along 4th Ave. in Brooklyn, Broad St. saw its ridership decline. I do wonder why the JFK stop at Howard Beach saw a seven percent dip in traffic as well.

Anyway, that’s your peek at the way we rode in 2010. Make of it as you will. It’s certainly one way to analyze the ever-changing demographics of New York City.

New York City’s subway trains are later than ever, and as the MTA Board grapples with these internal findings, the metrics are coming under question. What does it mean for a train to be late? Should we the straphanging public be concerned? Is subway service actually getting worse?

The news, as first reported by Michael Grynbaum at City Room and available in raw form this MTA Board document, goes something like this:

The Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 lines all recorded significant drops in on-time performance in March, the most recent month for which statistics were available, according to figures disclosed on Monday at an agency committee hearing. The numbered lines also performed worse than the lettered lines on nearly every major metric.

Nearly 90 percent of No. 3 trains were marked as “on time” in March 2010; one year later, only 71.8 percent of the line’s trains arrived on time. Compared with a year ago, the No. 2, 4 and 5 lines fell by 14 percent, and the No. 7 line, which has had significant problems because of troubles in its East River tunnel, dropped by 12.2 percent.

Over all, about 81 percent of trains on the numbered lines, including the Grand Central shuttle, were considered on time in March, a 10 percent drop from a year ago. That was far worse than both the BMT and IND lettered lines, the latter of which improved in March from a year ago. A subway train is considered on time if it reaches its terminal station within five minutes of its scheduled arrival.

Some of the board members were not pleased to hear this news. The recently-appointed Charles Moerdler, who has become a vocal member of the MTA oversight body not afraid to ask tough questions, pondered the root causes. “The IRT service continues to be pretty bad,” he said. “What long-term plans do we have to get that service up to snuff?”

Meanwhile, the story has been picked up by amNew York and New York 1, among others. Before we delve into the panic, let’s step back a bit. First, what does it mean to be late? Most straphangers just roll their eyes when told the subways are on any sort of schedule, and the MTA’s own metrics define a train as late if it arrives at the terminal after five minutes of its scheduled time.

In a vacuum, that’s not the most useful measure of anything. Wait assessments tell a better tale, and Transit head Thomas Prendergast recognized as much. “We’re still bound by the principle that evenness of service is by far the most important thing rather than just late, although we’d like to do both,” he said. “But evenness of service is more important because that way you’re having less impact on customers.”

Meanwhile, despite the hand-wringing, these numbers have improved between February and March. Far more 2, 4, 5 and 6 trains were on time in March than in February, and the 6 and 7 didn’t show statistically significant differences in on-time performance. Maybe then the story isn’t that trains are later; after all, a recent change in the way the MTA calculated “on-time performance” could account for the year-to-year difference. Maybe instead the story is off a small but incremental month-to-month improvement.

We’re still left though with the question of the quality of service, and Moerdler put it best. “The public really doesn’t give a damn whether the stats are right, or the stats are wrong,” he said. “If the service ain’t good, it ain’t good.” How ain’t good the service is remains a question without a solid answer.