You'll recall that recent report from the Independent Budget Office showing that in addition to delayed subway riders having to make a saving throw so as not to fall into morning madness, those delays also cost the city more than $1 million per day. Today the IBO has released another illustration detailing how subway service has declined since the halcyon days of 2012, when The Walkmen were still a band, and showing which lines currently have the most frequent delays.
In a colorful new chart, the IBO shows how the average amount of passenger hours lost to subway delays (which they defined as "the length of time that riders spend waiting on a station platform beyond the scheduled intervals between trains during the typical weekday morning rush") during morning rush hours went from 24,023 hours per year in 2012 to 34,900 hours in the period between May 2016 and May 2017. That's a total increase of 45 percent over those five years, and aside from one brief blip where the delay hours dropped slightly in 2013, the hours lost to delays have risen each year.
(IBO)
In case you wanted to either feel smugly superior to people who live on subway lines you don't care for or want some despair based on the line you do live near, the IBO also laid out the rise in delays by line. J/Z and C riders got things the worst, with the amount of hours lost to delays up 72.4 percent and 68.6 percent respectively. No line saw an increase in delays of less than 24.7 percent (congratulations to 3 train riders for having the line that was most consistently bad).
As far as which line saw the most delays when the study was finished, the 5 (2,809 hours) and the A (2,775 hours) were the lines in May that wasted the most straphanger time. Congratulations, as always, to all of us for walking out of the subway each morning with our sanity just hanging on by a thread that somehow hasn't snapped.
