Many E, F, N, Q, R and W riders had a rough ride Tuesday morning with signal issues clogging up the line.
NYC Transit President Andy Byford, at the agency’s committee meeting meeting on the same day, said that “performance is nowhere near good enough.”
The agency initially tweeted that there were “signal problems” at 59 St station at 7:37 a.m., and then followed up with reports of problems at Queens Plaza. Full service did not appear to be completely restored until almost five hours had passed.
Passengers tweeted out pictures of station platforms overflowing with people trying to get to work, and long lines for substitute bus service:
Indeed, an analysis of M.T.A. countdown clock data shows that there was a severe contraction in subway service during the morning rush hour.
Only 24 Manhattan-bound N trains passed through the 39 Ave station on Tuesday morning between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. This is effectively a 55% service cut — only 45% of the 53 trains scheduled to make a stop actually did so.
At the Avenue U station in Brooklyn, though the proper number of N trains were running, the maximum wait time between trains during the 8 o’clock hour was almost double what the schedule prescribed, at 15 minutes instead of nine.
Court Sq-23 St also experienced a service cut: only 82% of the scheduled northbound M trains, 23 instead of 28, arrived at the station between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m.
A previous analysis by The Big Board showed that in January 2018 many subway lines were not meeting their respective schedules.
Byford has made identifying “root causes” of reliability problems a core focus of his first month on the job, and pledged to riders to conduct a “full investigation” of the incident.
