That's really silly and a sign of how overblown this story has become (in some contexts). You would have been fine. When a system like the NYC Subway gets 20% worse for everyday commuters, that's a really big deal and something those commuters are going to talk about a lot. But a NYC Subway that's 20% worse than it was 10 years ago is still a massive, complex, incredible, useful machine, no matter how much New Yorkers complain about it.
And, so, should they complain? Yeah! There's nothing wrong with expecting more from the MTA. But these stories are generating comments like yours here and that's absurd.
On-time performance has dropped dramatically in the past ten years. In the following article, look for the graph titled, "On-time performance by line, 2007 to 2017".
Yes, and it shouldn't take more than a couple minutes of thinking about the issues to realize that most of the commentary on the topic makes very little sense. Experiential measurements aren't so easily calculated, I'd say.
Just a few examples:
- Would you rather have a train that arrives one minute late every single day, for a 0% on-time record, or a train that arrives on time 3 out of every 5 times and then is 20 minutes late the other two? How many articles on the subway distinguish between the two types of lateness? It matters a lot.
- You might read that Atlanta's MARTA, for example, has a better on-time performance record than the NYC Subway. Well, that's great, but it's also got rush-hour scheduled headways of 10 minutes, scheduled off-peak headways of 20 minutes or more, and no service entirely at many stations after 9PM (no trains run at all after 2AM). So something that's "late" in New York City still comes before the scheduled train in Atlanta (when the trains there come at all). [0]
- The NYC Subway also has 10 times as many stations as MARTA and 17 times as many miles of track. They say the best camera is the one you have on you. Something like that applies here, too. What's the on-time record for a train that doesn't exist?
MARTA is a random comparison, but it's not uncommon for writers of screeds about the subway to offer up comparisons to other systems devoid of any of the kind of context I provide above.
So, you know: 1) comparisons are difficult; 2) especially if you want to capture what it's actually like to use transit in the cities you're comparing. All of which is to support my original contention that this story has been decontextualized by surly commuters and the idea that a tourist couldn't rely on the subway to get to a concert is nonsense.
What about a train that idles for an extra 0-15 minutes, in order to make sure that it arrives on time, because there is 15 minutes of headroom baked into the schedule?
The parent poster notes that trains in Atlanta do just that.
> All of which is to support my original contention that this story has been decontextualized by surly commuters and the idea that a tourist couldn't rely on the subway to get to a concert is nonsense.
I don't have access to any numbers you don't. I've tried to describe the ways in which I think the numbers can be used to tell a misleading and unnecessarily apocalyptic story. If I've failed to make that case on the merits, then I'll have to live with that, but just for the record, the 20% figure I gave was plainly illustrative, not a quote of actual figures; your references to it demonstrate the power of the anchoring effect, but I'll happily clarify, again, that they were -- I think manifestly, but the communication failure is mine, if not -- randomly chosen to make a point, not culled from a stash of secret MTA data.
The mere fact that people from Rhode Island now believe that they won't be able to successfully use the subway to attend a concert is I think pretty strong evidence that the story has gotten away from us a bit. Nobody here, least of all me, wishes to downplay your commute.
That's fine - non-quantitative (a.k.a. "gut") reasoning is a valid and useful cognitive tool (in certain contexts), in fact.
If I was to give a "gut" estimate for the overall deterioration of the subway service in recent years, though -- I'd peg it at closer to 30 or 40 percent than merely 20.
And, so, should they complain? Yeah! There's nothing wrong with expecting more from the MTA. But these stories are generating comments like yours here and that's absurd.