Cuomo Asked Us To 'Look Carefully' At The NYC Subway: We Found 1 In 3 Trains Still Delayed

NEW YORK, NY — New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, reluctant overlord of the disintegrating NYC subway system, was asked last week by a reporter when his constituents might expect their number one mode of public transport to become halfway rideable again. Cuomo replied: "If you were looking very carefully, you would see improvement already."

"I hear from people who say the tracks look cleaner or the service seems better," the governor explained. "So I'm hearing it already."

In the days since, Cuomo has been roasted to a crisp for his secondhand subway anecdote.

No Twitter burn could be quite as searing, though, as the 79-page "operations performance summary" quietly uploaded by state staffers to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) website Friday night.

The document is full of detailed subway data for the months of June and July. It was meant as a stack of study material, essentially, for members of the MTA's Transit and Bus Committee ahead of their monthly meeting on Monday.

But it doubles as the only real, hard insight into the overall state of the NYC subway system that the press and public have been given in months.

So here's what the "summer of hell" — the subway one, not the Penn Station one that Cuomo pinned on Amtrak — looked like on paper.

By most measures, June 2017 was the worst month in modern MTA history.

Around 37 percent of all subway trips, or 82,169 trains, were delayed in June. Nearly 30,000 of those delays were blamed on overcrowding. Another 12,500 or so were blamed on the system's failing set of train signals from the 1930s. Wait times for riders were the highest on record.

This explains a lot about the chaos on the ground.

On June 5, an F train of doom abruptly lost power beneath Lower Manhattan, trapping passengers in a pitch-black subterranean jail that got so hot they started hyperventilating and taking off their clothes. On June 27, an A train hit a loose track and derailed in Harlem — smashing into a tunnel wall, injuring dozens and causing a ripple effect of nearly 850 delays.

And in the weeks between, tens of thousands of (somewhat less memorable) delays screwed up countless jobs and dates and plans. At least a couple dozen commuters said the delays even got them fired.

July's numbers were a little better than June's. Most notably, the delay count dropped back down to 33 percent of all trains. But that's still around the same count as earlier this year. And it's more than triple the amount of delays we were seeing five years ago.

In short: One out of every three trains in the NYC subway system is still running late in late 2017.

Another scary figure from July: The MTA's aging fleet of train cars, many of them a half-century old, were breaking down at a much faster rate than in months prior.

It's this kind of ancient infrastructure that transit experts and advocates say will continue to clog up the system — and possibly end up killing someone — if it doesn't get a complete overhaul. Especially the subway's Depression-era train signals, which experts say are almost solely responsible for the overcrowding problem. Why? Because they're too old and slow and glitchy to direct the additional trains needed to handle 5.5 million-plus daily commuters (and counting) — so we're stuck with the current, insufficient train fleet.

But a fancy new signal system would likely take upward of 50 years to install, according to the city's Independent Budget Office — and many more billions than the MTA is being allotted now.

Gov. Cuomo is more optimistic.

He thinks Joe Lhota, the star transit exec he brought in over the summer to save the MTA, only needs around a year to get the subway back on track — as outlined in Lhota's $836 million subway fix-it plan, unveiled in July. "So I would give them that period of time," Cuomo told reporters last week.

Less clear is who's planning on footing NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio's half of the bill. (Because the mayor certainly isn't.) Or, come to think of it, who's sitting on all those $1 million ideas submitted to the MTA.

"A Con Ed generator blows up, it's not the fault of the MTA," the governor added at his press conference. "A piece of track breaks off, it's not the fault of the MTA. Those things will always happen. And so they're not a fair indicator of the performance of the MTA because the MTA doesn't control those things."

Cuomo's office did not respond to a request for comment on why the MTA would not be held responsible for a piece of track breaking off in the subway.

Lead photo by Richard Drew/Associated Press