Riding that Train, High on Cocaine

The NY Times reported today that in 2009 almost 96% of all commuter trains arrived on time coming into NYC which I have to think came as a big surprise to the working-schleps from NJ, Westchester and Long Island  who take the Metro-North, NJ Transit and LIRR options every morning.    To be fair to the NYT they did note that during their analysis they did notice that during rush-hour that 96% number didn't come close to holding true.  Then again you probably don't need a doctorate in mathematics to figure out when you look at the vast amounts of people waiting for trains in Penn Station and Grand Central..  

That's the thing with these stats somehow they never seem to reflect what is really going on in real life.   Who gives a crap if a bunch of trains arrive 15 minutes early at 4AM except for the fact the way that the LIRR counts the stats they take an average arrival time over all the trains to come up with the number.    So all the LIRR has to do is throw a couple of bogus train-rides out in the middle of the night to bump up their averages.   

You see this all the time with airlines when they brag about 'on time arrivals.'     Look at the average flight from NYC to Amsterdam for example.   Your ticket will give say you are scheduled to depart at 6pm and land at 8AM the next morning (8 hours) while anybody who has ever taken that flight know it takes 'only' 6 ½ hours of fly-time.    So getting there 'on time' really only means that they made the window so god-damn big that a herd of geese could fly through it.

Even if statistically true, in a city whose 8 million resident and millions more commuting in from the suburbs are forced to pay increasing prices for services which are regularly put to the chopping block, these 96% numbers are a weak consolation prize.

See I guess I don't understand how trains can be so late, they run on the same schedules every day, encounter the same predictable delays, pick up the same New York Newsday reading passengers and come into the same transit stations.    Obviously if you have a guy jump onto a track there should be some delays but it can't be that hard to try to be on time when you don't have to worry about traffic and you have a designated parking spot.

 It was also noted by TOR that they left the Subway on-time arrival information out of the article as the R train alone could skew the on-time arrival numbers so drastically it could make July 2010 look like a relatively cool month.   The subway's are so off-schedule that the MTA doesn't post schedules in stations or in cars.   The only place you can even find them is buried deep in their webpage and honestly I've tried to use those in real-time and it's impossible since the trains have no markings to identify them.  So if you are at Pacific Street and a train shows up at 7:15AM train you don't know if it's the one scheduled to be there at that time or if the train you are getting on at was really supposed to be there at 15 minutes ago.

 

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