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‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/03...e-trains-down/

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- The root cause of the subway system’s decay, it turns out, isn’t budget cuts or overcrowding — rather, the collapse of the subway system appears to have been primarily self-inflicted by the authority itself, in response to a single accident two decades ago that set the transit system on a path to disaster. --- Much of what the MTA is doing to fix the subways, including the authority’s $836 million Subway Action Plan, is not addressing the bulk of the delays that are plaguing the city’s transit system. And only now has the subway’s leadership, since the recent hiring of New York City Transit president Andy Byford, begun to seriously consider its own role.

- Simply replacing old technologies with new ones may not be enough to solve all the subway’s fundamental problems. The subway’s performance has been steadily deteriorating for many years. The authority’s own internal data shows that delays due to “incidents,” such as broken signals and tracks or water damage, have only marginally increased since 2012. But there is one type of delay that’s gotten exponentially worse during that time: a catchall category blandly titled “insufficient capacity, excess dwell, unknown,” which captures every delay without an obvious cause.

- From January 2012 to December 2017, these delays increased by a whopping 1,190 percent — from 105 per weekday to 1,355. In December, one out of every six trains run across the entire system experienced such a delay. The increase has been steady and uninterrupted over the past six years. In other words, as the rest of the system has remained relatively stable, this catchall category has worsened to the point that it’s gone from a minor problem to the single biggest cause of delays in the system.

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