Usually when public transit networks start showing strain, it's during rush hours, when they're handling massive spikes in ridership. To give an example from Chicago: If you're trying to get on the train downtown at 6:00pm, you'll get on the next train, and probably get to sit in a seat. If you try to do it at 5:00pm, you stand a good chance of waiting 30 minutes for a train that you can even physically get on to. When you do, your ride will probably also take 50% longer than the 6pm ride would have. And maybe even 100% longer than a ride at 7pm would have.

You naturally get all the complaints from the rush hour riders. And yeah, if your concert were starting at 6 in the evening so that you'd have to brave rush hour traffic, then that would be a problem. But so would driving.

If, like most concerts, it was starting a bit later, you'd very likely have experienced smooth service.

* planned work every weekend and most late weeknights which reroutes half the trains and is described in terms guaranteed to confuse visitors. A complete map of the changed routes would help massively; instead, you get a long list of textual descriptions such as "Brooklyn-bound F trains are running express on the E track between Court Sq and W 4th St and local on the D track to Stillwell Av" which scares and confuses tourists who barely understand downtown Manhattan geography, much less how it relates to the rest of the city.

* occasional unreliability at any time of the day, typically either due to signal failures in century-old analog wiring, or because of paramedics or cops shutting down an entire station to take care of a rowdy or injured passenger.

Locals have learned to adapt. They know what the cryptic planned work descriptions mean and in which situations next station alerts are lying. They have learned to understand the static-y conductor announcements on a loud train. They know that on some lines, if you must to be at your destination on time, you ought to leave 30 minutes early just in case this ride is the 1/20 when something happens.

Visitors don't know such things, and I can empathize with their apprehension.

What line are you describing? I take the L every day from downtown around 5 and I can reliably get on the first train and it will arrive in < 10 minutes (and there's a good chance I'll have a seat). If a train takes more than 10 minutes, it will almost certainly be packed full, but it will also almost certainly be followed by another nearly-empty train in ~1-2 minutes.

Which is admittedly the worst scenario that I could think of, and I should have said that. It gets better quickly from there. I used to get on 2 stops further south, and, yeah, at 5 I usually had no problems and a decent chance of getting a seat, too.

Now UIC Halsted, you're very likely to get a seat, not always though.

We were both talking about 5PM.

> Also he was talking about C&L.

I had no way of knowing this when I wrote my post. :)

Unless it was on the weekend when there are a multitude of service interruptions and station closures.

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.

By what metric?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/28/nyregion/subw...

But eyeballing that chart suggests an average deterioration significantly worse than 20 percent.

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.

[0] https://www.itsmarta.com/railline-schedules.aspx

> Would you rather have a train that arrives one minute late every single day, for a 0% on-time record

At this point, the operator should just update the schedule to reflect actual travel speed.

The parent poster notes that trains in Atlanta do just that.

The L train?

I was merely responding to someone else who brought up a numbers-based argument only to find out that they... apparently don't have any.

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.

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.

Now, look, that doesn’t mean it’s good that it’s declined so much, but context and perspective remain useful.

But compared to just about any major city in Europe... seriously, it's almost a joke.

But they shouldn't have been downvoted for expressing that sentiment.

The MTA has problems, but it still usually gets you where you need to go.