Talk Bronx New York

Subway Delays Rise, and the No. 4 Line Is Slowest

A crowded No. 4 train sits at a Grand Central Terminal subway platform on Monday. Riders holding doors open is cited as the second biggest reason for subway delays, behind track work.

People who hazard the No. 4 subway line each day don’t need the numbers to tell them: It’s slow. Not just slow, it turns out, but of the city’s two dozen or so subway lines, its on-time performance is the poorest and getting worse, according to new statistics released on Monday by New York City Transit.

The figures were among a raft of dismal performance numbers included in a report to the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the transit agency. They included a 24 percent spike in the number of delays systemwide, measured over the year ending in May, the latest records available.

The indicators come as the authority is considering a second consecutive year of fare increases to help close a budget gap of nearly $900 million. Transit officials said at least some of the performance problems are tied to past budget cuts in subway car maintenance.

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A Bigger Penalty for Riders Who Cheat on the Fare

The bad old days of subway turnstile jumping may be gone, but the fine for trying to sneak a free ride went up on Monday anyway, to $100 from $60 — the first increase in nearly a quarter century.

From Jan. 1 through July 6 this year, transit police issued 41,090 tickets for fare evasion and arrested an additional 8,437 people for not paying the subway fare, according to police data. That is an average of 263 tickets or arrests a day for fare evasion in a subway system with a volume of more than five million rides on an average weekday.

Things were very different in the early 1990s, when the system was in the throes of a fare-beating epidemic.

In the first six months of 1991 the transit police issued 123,773 summonses and made 9,942 arrests for fare evasion, according to a report in The New York Times. That was an average of about 743 tickets and arrests a day, at a time when ridership was much lower.

Just a year earlier, in 1990, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimated that more than 200,000 people jumped a subway turnstile every day. By 1997, with stronger enforcement, an improving transit system and the advent of new turnstiles for use with MetroCards (the turnstile barriers are longer and harder to squeeze past), the estimate of farebeaters had fallen to 35,000 a day.

The authority no longer makes such estimates public, but the data on arrests and summonses suggests that while turnstile jumping has not gone the way of the token, it is no longer as common as it was in the early 1990s. But even as fares rose and the subway system improved, the fine for fare beating remained unchanged.

It was set at $60 in 1984 and went into effect the following year, when a special tribunal was set up to handle transit offenses, like turnstile jumping, riding on the outside of a subway car or playing loud music in a station.

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