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by untog 2028 days ago
As someone living in NYC I can attest that the local/express lines are great. But I'd kill for 95% reliability! The on-time performance in NYC is somewhere around 80% and likely to get worse with the huge budget issues NYC will have post-COVID.
2 comments
oh_sigh 2028 days ago
Keep in mind that the Paris metro has 0% reliability if you need to ride it between 2AM and 5:30AM. Or rather it is 100% reliably not running during those hours. NYC could probably boost those numbers if they could do track maintenance during guaranteed non-running hours.
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untog 2028 days ago
NYC can already do that: it's not uncommon for express lines to be shut down overnight for work to be completed, for example.

(the entire system is shut down overnight right now anyway)

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buybackoff 2028 days ago
I was talking about the scheduled time - when it must work, but it doesn't.
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buybackoff 2028 days ago
What do you mean by "on-time performance"? I lived for 6 months in Manhattan on 112th and it worked fine. Probably one or two times my station was closed in the morning and I had to walk down to the next one.

And as someone who lived in Moscow for a long time I can attest it is the gold standard. It's the second busiest (or top-3) and just always works as scheduled. One rare thing one could rely on that comes from the government.

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NikolaeVarius 2028 days ago
The NYC Subway has a timetable, except no one gives a shit because it has very little relation to real life.
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toxik 2028 days ago
That’s pretty strange though, I don’t think I’ve seen a subway with a time table before. It’s too frequent for it to matter in the first place, you just need to know when the next train towards your destination is coming!
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bobthepanda 2028 days ago
It has a timetable primarily because

- due to all the merging in and out throughout the system, trains need to be in the right place at the right time or merging delays will cascade throughout the system

- for purposes of employee scheduling, you need to make sure that the right employees are in the right place at the right time; generally a train leaving a terminal is being driven by a crew that had to come in from somewhere else.

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nerdponx 2028 days ago
It's also still useful as a general approximation for "how long should I expect to wait for the next train". Same with the bus lines.
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viraptor 2028 days ago
Isn't that a different idea than a timetable? "We're aiming for one train every 10min" and "there's a train at 12.10, 12.20, 12.30" are similar, but not quite the same. You can get your approximation without a timetable though.
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NikolaeVarius 2028 days ago
Available at https://new.mta.info/schedules

If you dont have one, how do you measure performance of the system?

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bobthepanda 2028 days ago
Various approaches.

One could make the argument that a train showing up ten minutes late vs one on time doesn't really matter to a person so long as it shows up within a reasonable time of them getting to the station and it still takes them to their destination on time. If the headways are five minutes and every single train is running at the same speed just five minutes late, this is a distinction that doesn't matter to the passenger.

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xapata 2028 days ago
> too frequent

Depends on the line and destination.

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untog 2028 days ago
Info from the MTA here:

https://www.mta.info/press-release/nyc-transit/new-full-year...

I regret to inform you that the NYC subway has many more problems than you experienced. Before the pandemic I traveled between Brooklyn and Manhattan and problems were common. Much more common was just random slowdowns, sitting between stations, etc. that makes it a lot more difficult to know when you'll arrive at your destination.

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buybackoff 2028 days ago
I'm not sure, but it looks that OTP is much stricter measure than what I meant. I was talking about: I want to change from line A to B on station X (or exit on the station X)... Station X is closed, and I learn about that on station (X-1), or even just by not stopping on the station X.

It happened in Paris more than "extraordinary" number of times, so I have to put extra 15 mins to every important travel.

OTP sounds like: the train is scheduled at 3:25, it arrives at 3.26. Correct me if I'm wrong here. But if the normal margin is 5 mins for total time of travel, making it 15 mins is not nice.

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