State of the Subways Report Card 2004

2. Measures are: frequency of scheduled service; how regularly trains arrive; delays due to car mechanical problems; chance to get a seat at peak period; car cleanliness; and in-car announcements. Regularity of service is the measure of gaps in service or bunching together of trains.

3. The 1/9 and 3 lines were still impacted by the September 11th, 2001 attacks in 2002. They had different routings in the first three quarters of 2002 than during the last half of 2003. As a result, this report cannot make comparisons for these lines between study periods in 2002 and 2003.

4. These lines were affected by the restoration of all four tracks on the Manhattan Bridge. The report marks these lines with asterisks to highlight that the routing today has changed from the period covered by this Report Card. For example, in the last half of 2003, both the B and the D lines terminated at 34th Street/Herald Square after traveling downtown from the Bronx and Upper Manhattan. Starting in February 2004, service on these lines to Brooklyn was restored.

5. We derived the MetroCard Ratings with the help of independent transportation experts. Descriptions of the methodology can be found in Section II and Appendix I. The rating was developed in two steps. First, we decided how much weight to give each of the six measures of transit service. Then we placed each line on a scale that permits fair and consistent comparisons. In our 2003 report, using data largely from the second half of 2002, we created a “baseline” of performance on six measures. Under this formula, a line whose 2003 performance fell exactly at the average in this baseline would receive a MetroCard rating of $1.00 in this report. Any line at the 95th percentile of this range would receive a rating of $2.00, the current base fare.

6. We were unable to give an overall MetroCard Rating to the G because reliable data on crowding is not available. We also did not profile the system’s three permanent shuttle lines—the Franklin Avenue Shuttle, the Rockaway Park Shuttle, and the Times Square Shuttle—because data is not available.

7. We did not issue a Report Card in 2002. Because of the severe impact on the subways from the World Trade Center attack, ratings based on service at the end of 2001 would not have been appropriate.

8. We define improvement as a percentage change of one percent or more. This standard is used throughout the report.

9. There is no comparable crowding data available for the G; data on crowding was issued for the V in 2003 but not 2002. The 1/9 and 3 lines were still impacted by the September 11th, 2001 attacks in 2002. They had different routings in the first three quarters of 2002 than during the last half of 2003.

10. For some measures, small differences in rounding scores explain the first- and last-place rankings.

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