In general when you arrive on the platform, you can’t directly observe when the last train departed, but you can make a guess based on the number of people who are waiting. Turn on javascript (or click through from RSS) to view all subway lines. I used the same data to compute conditional wait time distributions: given that it’s been N minutes since the last train, how much longer should you expect to wait? In most cases, the shortest conditional wait time occurs when it’s been 5 to 8 minutes since the last train.Ĭhoose your line to view conditional wait times. There’s a Goldilocks zone in the middle: a healthy amount of crowding that suggests it’s been a few minutes since the last train, but not so long that things must be screwed up. Even worse, an extremely crowded platform means that something is probably wrong, and maybe the train will never arrive. An empty platform means that you probably just missed the last train, so it’s unlikely another one will be arriving very soon.
Most New Yorkers intuitively understand that when they get to a subway platform, they don’t want it to be too empty or too crowded. How crowded should you want the platform to be when you arrive? In general, wait times are shortest during morning and evening rush hours, though keep in mind that the data doesn’t know about cases where trains might be too crowded to board, forcing you to wait for the next train.Ĭhoose your line below, and you can see how long you should expect to wait for a train by time of day, based on weekday performance from January to May 2018. The above graph is restricted to weekdays between 7:00 AM and 8:00 PM, but wait times vary from hour to hour. For example, if you’re traveling from Union Square to Grand Central, the 4, 5, and 6 lines will all get you there, so your effective wait time would be shorter than if you had to rely on one specific line.) How long will you have to wait for your train? Note also that in some cases, different lines can serve as substitutes. See the appendix for a more mathematical treatment on converting between time between trains and expected wait time. (Note that expected wait time is different from time between trains. I’ll have a bit more to say on that in a moment… Systemwide CBTC is the cornerstone of the recently announced ambitious plan to fix the subways.
METRO NYC J LINE WEEKDAYS FULL
The 7 train, the second most reliable according to my data, is currently running “partial” CBTC, and is slated for full CBTC in 2018. The L train is also the only line that uses modern communications-based train control (CBTC), which allows trains to operate in a more automated fashion.
The top four trains with the shortest waits-the L, 7, 1, and 6-are the only trains that run on dedicated tracks, which presumably helps avoid delays due to trains from other lines merging in and out on different schedules.
The chart below shows how long you should expect to wait for each train line, assuming you arrive on the platform at a random time on a weekday between 7:00 AM and 8:00 PM. Which NYC subway lines have the longest wait times? Over the past 5 months, I’ve collected and processed some 24 million stops’ worth of this data to try to make sense of New York’s vast and troubled subway system. Although there’s no official record of when trains actually stopped at each station, the countdown clock data can be used to approximate. If you’ve been on a New York City subway platform since January 2018, you should have noticed a countdown clock that displayed an estimate of when the next train would arrive.
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