Brooklyn-bound straphangers on the R line might discover their prepare holding within the station as soon as they hit Decrease Manhattan — however MTA officers say that’s all a part of a plan to get them shifting by way of Kings County extra shortly.
Armed with a brand new technique for dispatching trains, rail site visitors controllers on the MTA are actually utilizing varied instruments — together with holding trains at choose stations — to hurry up the R line by way of Brooklyn.
“If a train is scheduled [to arrive] every six minutes, and customers are waiting 10, that’s not good service,” Invoice Amarosa, NYC Transit’s head of subways, stated final week. “We want to make sure that we don’t have trains coming every 10 minutes followed by a train two minutes behind it.”
However knowledge collected by NYC Transit exhibits riders boarding trains in Brooklyn headed to the southern finish of the R line — to Bay Ridge and Sundown Park — had been ready a median of two minutes greater than they need to have, Amarosa stated.
“We started a new dispatching strategy on the R line to keep more even service coming into the Brooklyn end for riders returning to Sunset Park and Bay Ridge,” he stated. “By looking at the train sequencing in Manhattan on the downtown trains, we can keep those trains more even, and avoid big gaps in service that customers were seeing on the Brooklyn end.”
To perform that, tower operators and controllers at MTA’s rail management middle have been informed to make use of a variety of instruments to maintain southbound R trains evenly spaced as they go by way of the Montague St. tubes on their manner into Brooklyn. Some trains would possibly maintain for one or two minutes at Whitehall St., the southern-most station in Manhattan. Others could also be given the best of manner at a change whereas crossing over one other line so as to make up time.
“At Whitehall St., the R is getting ready to go into the busiest portion of the line,” Amarosa stated. “We really want those trains to be at the right headways coming into Jay St., De Kalb and Atlantic Ave, because that’s going to give the most customers the best service.”
“The R is an interesting line,” Amarosa stated. “The riders in Brooklyn are very often taking another express train from Manhattan to DeKalb or Atlantic Ave. and then getting on the R there for the rest of the ride to Bay Ridge.”
“By keeping the service as even as we can at those stations the majority of riders are getting better service,” he added.
The transfer comes as a part of a philosophical shift, contemplating station-by-station wait occasions — identified in subway-speak as “headways” — alongside “on-time performance,” a metric that measures whether or not a prepare made it to the top of the road inside 5 minutes of the scheduled finish of its run.
“On-time performance is an operational metric which is really important to me to get my trains and crews to the end of the line,” Amarosa stated. “But we recognize that customers don’t ride from end to end.”
Systemwide on-time efficiency for the month of August was simply above 85%, in accordance with publicly accessible knowledge. The R prepare carried out worse, coming in with slightly below 80% of trains reaching their terminal inside 5 minutes of the schedule.
However Amarosa stated he was making an attempt to enhance service past that uncooked quantity, specializing in how riders really use the strains.
Night out headways additionally extra evenly divides passengers throughout trains. Trains with extra passengers are heavier, transfer extra slowly, and dwell at stations with their doorways open for longer — all slowing down any less-occupied, “lighter” trains behind it.
And to this point, Amarosa stated, the plan appears to be working.
“What we’re seeing is the trains leaving Atlantic Ave. heading towards Bay Ridge are more even in terms of frequency, and they’re more evenly loaded,” the subway boss stated.
For the reason that new strategy started, Amarosa stated his analysts estimate platform wait time on the R prepare has been decreased by about 25%.
“This strategy is working to reduce the wait time and get people to where they’re going much faster,” he stated.
Amarosa stated related applications are at present being examined on the No. 6 prepare and the J prepare.
