Brooklyn-bound straphangers on the R line may notice their train holding in the station once they hit Lower Manhattan — but MTA officials say that’s all part of a plan to get them moving through Kings County more quickly.
Armed with a new strategy for dispatching trains, rail traffic controllers at the MTA are now using various tools — including holding trains at select stations — to speed up the R line through Brooklyn.
“If a train is scheduled [to arrive] every six minutes, and customers are waiting 10, that’s not good service,” Bill Amarosa, NYC Transit’s head of subways, said last week. “We want to make sure that we don’t have trains coming every 10 minutes followed by a train two minutes behind it.”
But data collected by NYC Transit shows riders boarding trains in Brooklyn headed to the southern end of the R line — to Bay Ridge and Sunset Park — were waiting an average of two minutes more than they should have, Amarosa said.
“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 said. “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 accomplish that, tower operators and controllers at MTA’s rail control center have been told to employ a number of tools to keep southbound R trains evenly spaced as they pass through the Montague St. tubes on their way into Brooklyn. Some trains might hold for one or two minutes at Whitehall St., the southern-most station in Manhattan. Others may be given the right of way at a switch while crossing over another line in order to make up time.
“At Whitehall St., the R is getting ready to go into the busiest portion of the line,” Amarosa said. “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 said. “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 move comes as part of a philosophical shift, considering station-by-station wait times — known in subway-speak as “headways” — alongside “on-time performance,” a metric that measures whether a train made it to the end of the line within five minutes of the scheduled end 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 said. “But we recognize that customers don’t ride from end to end.”
Systemwide on-time performance for the month of August was just above 85%, according to publicly available data. The R train performed worse, coming in with just below 80% of trains reaching their terminal within five minutes of the schedule.
But Amarosa said he was trying to improve service beyond that raw number, focusing on how riders actually use the lines.
Evening out headways also more evenly divides passengers across trains. Trains with more passengers are heavier, move more slowly, and dwell at stations with their doors open for longer — all slowing down any less-occupied, “lighter” trains behind it.
And so far, Amarosa said, the plan seems 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 said.
Since the new approach began, Amarosa said his analysts estimate platform wait time on the R train has been reduced by about 25%.
“This strategy is working to reduce the wait time and get people to where they’re going much faster,” he said.
The very nature of the strategy is such that there is no one-size fits all approach, and Amarosa told the Daily News his teams were going “line by line” to figure out where else in the system wait times could be reduced.
Amarosa said similar programs are currently being tested on the No. 6 train and the J train.
