The Straphangers Campaign charged that Transit’s effort is not a sincere attempt to come up with better or simpler measures, but is instead an exercise in social promotion for transit managers.

Consider the one and only concrete example that Transit provided on Friday: For the M101 bus, the old measure of how regularly the bus arrived was 40%. Under the new measure, it shoots up to 75%. Without adding a single bus, or cracking down on cars parking at bus stops, or any other action to improve service, the M101’s service regularity improves dramatically.

Except for the M101 statistic, NYC Transit officials withheld new and old statistics for the overall subway and bus system, for all 20 subway lines and another 41 bus routes. They also did not release statistics generated by their proposal for a more forgiving standard for “on-time performance.”

NYC Transit floated the yardstick change last September, sparking a flurry of criticism (MTR #286). The most fundamental change mentioned then shifted the measure of on-time performance from adherence to a scheduled interval between trains or buses to a “wait assessment” that would classify anything arriving within three minutes of its scheduled arrival as on time. The new assessment method would mean that official service regularity performance for lines with short scheduled intervals will jump upward even if scheduled intervals are not met — the M101 numbers distributed Friday seem to bear this contention our. A chart provided by NYC Transit last fall also showed that while the present system showed 80.7% of subway trains on-time during the second quarter of 2000, the new measures would hike the rate to 89.5%.

Last fall’s proposal would also count early trains as on time, while the current system does not, adding further leeway to on-time performance. “It’s like setting the scale to negative 10 and saying you’ve lost weight,” said the Straphangers Campaign’s Gene Russianoff.

Transit’s original proposal called for rating train and station cleanliness at depots or before the morning peak, rather than during the course of daytime operation.

Transit advocates also expressed concern that adoption of the new system would wipe out the ability of NYC Transit or independent groups to make historical comparisons of service provision and performance.