July’s massive, two-day signal outage at Manhattan’s W. Fourth St. subway station delayed 2,275 subway trains, according to MTA data — accounting for more than 14% of the delays attributable to equipment failures that month.
As previously reported by the Daily News, electrical problems at the key Greenwich Village subway station wreaked havoc on commutes at the height of summer, burning out transformers that fed electrical power to the subway signals for two nonconsecutive days.
The outages caused a string of red lights at the heart of the subway’s B Division — the lettered lines — causing massive delays and rerouting on the A, C, E, B, D, F and M lines.
According to recent data posted by the MTA, during the month of July, the overall subway system experienced 39,078 total delays — defined as a train arriving at its intended terminal more than 5 minutes behind schedule, skipping any planned station stops or being canceled outright.
/ New York Daily News)
According to the MTA data, equipment and infrastructure failures accounted for 16,202 of those delays during July.
The first outage at W. Fourth St., which began at 8:32 a.m. on July 29, delayed 1,003 trains before being resolved, MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan told The News.
The second outage, which began at 8:32 a.m. two days later — July 31 — snarled subways through the p.m. rush hour as work crews wrestled multiple replacement transformers into place.
Donovan said that 1,272 trains were held up by that outage.
In total, the incident delayed or rerouted 2,257 trains over two days — 14% of all the system’s equipment-related delays in July and 6% of all delays, in general.
Equipment failures were the cause of most of July’s delays — as they have been for most months since the pandemic lockdown.
In addition, a lack of available train crews was responsible for 3,161 delays in July, according to the data. “Police and medical” incidents caused 8,106 trains to run behind schedule, and 7,945 subway slowdowns during July were due to preplanned track work.
“Operating conditions,” such as movement of work trains, accounted for 2,508 delays, while “external factors,” such as weather conditions and flooding, were behind 1,156 holdups.
The cause of the W. Fourth St. outage remains under investigation.
