MTA Rolling Out New Online Info on Subway Service

The MTA wants to give riders better tools for planning their ride. On Monday, the agency unveiled a new, user-friendly, online dashboard with data about every subway line.

It's part of MTA Chairman Joe Lhota's year-long, $800 million effort to improve subway service.

Starting Wednesday, riders will be able to go online and find data about their line, for the numbered lines going back 13 months, and the lettered lines going back to March. That includes information about major delays, timeliness, how long trips take, and how long riders wait at the platform for trains.

It's a huge shift from how the MTA previously measured service, but they'll keep collecting that data because it's still useful for MTA management.

The MTA acknowledges the old way isn't as useful for riders, and they say the new dashboard will provide line-specific information.

"If the schedule calls for 27 trains per hour to reach it's peak, most crucial-used station, how many of those trains actually arrived within that hour?"  said Tim Mulligan, executive vice president of New York City Transit, at Monday's board meeting. "How much service was provided to customers?"

"The new dashboard is a major transparency improvement, and the new metrics will help agency leadership better prioritize investments to improve subway performance," said Zak Accuardi, a senior program analyst with the think tank Transit Center. "We would also like to see equivalent bus performance statistics and longer time-horizons displayed historically where the data are available. We're hopeful the agency will be adding these features soon." 

The agency said it's able to provide this info to riders now because of countdown clocks on the lettered lines, and by using swipe data from Metro Cards.

So far, using this data, the MTA has learned:

— The average subway ride, system-wide, is 30 minutes.

— Riders wait an average of one to one-and-a-half minutes longer than the schedule says they should on each ride.

— The L train is the best performing line in the system.

The MTA plans to add more historical data to the lettered lines service data to improve the online information.