DiNapoli Report Identifies Trends in Causes of Subway Delays

Subway on-time performance (OTP) last year and in the first half of 2025 remained better than in 2019, but the causes of delays have changed as riders have returned. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has an opportunity to further improve performance and reduce troubling delays by targeting the main issues slowing down trains, including planned maintenance work, police and medical issues on trains and platforms, and signal and subway equipment problems according to a new report released by State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli.

"As the MTA prioritizes work in its capital program and brings back riders, it's important to understand where and how subway service is being disrupted and delayed," DiNapoli said. "Targeting problem areas like signals and issues with subway cars that add to delays can improve straphangers experience and boost ridership. Working with the Police Department, Fire Department, and Homeless Services can also help reduce incidents that cause delays. Above all, the MTA should be clear and open about the work it is prioritizing to reduce delays and how those actions will benefit the public."

Under MTA/NYC Transit rules, a subway is on time if it reaches its last stop within five minutes of its scheduled arrival without skipping any stops. With far fewer straphangers during the pandemic and reduced overnight service, subways on-time performance (OTP) reached as high as 85% in 2021. As ridership and overnight service came back, delays have risen again.

Last year, the MTA ran 2.7 million trains with 486,614 experiencing delays. In other words, 82.2% ran on time, a slightly better performance than the pre-pandemic rate of 81.1% in 2019, as the system ran more trains in 2024 than it did that year. So far, 2025 has seen improvement. Through June, as ridership increased to 75% of pre-pandemic levels, there have been 214,714 delays, down 13% compared to the same period last year.

Understanding the causes of delays is key to improving subway service:

• Infrastructure and equipment problems caused 24% of delays in 2023, increased to 31% of delays in 2024, and rose again by 11% in the first half of 2025 compared to the first half of last year.
• Delays caused by police or medical response caused 23% of delays in 2024, but were down 7% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period last year.
• One in four delays (25%) in 2024 were caused by planned maintenance work.
• Worker absences caused 7% of delays last year, a major improvement over the 24% of delays in 2023. Through June 2025, improvement continued as these delays declined by 48% compared to last year.

Subway delays are likely to increase with ridership and while the MTA cannot control them all, there are areas, particularly related to signals, equipment, and infrastructure where it can target investments to improve service, as it did in recent years under the Subway Action Plan. DiNapoli's report called on the MTA to explain how this spending will help reduce delays associated with those causes. The MTA must also be transparent about the methodological changes it has made in how it calculates delays by sharing data on New York State OpenData, with the relevant board committees and the public. It should also explain how these changing methodologies affect comparisons of delay data and how such changes will improve its ability to respond to delays.

This issue arose during the course of the Comptroller analysis, when the MTA informed the office that it revised how it classified delays for 2024 to assign more delays to specific incidents. Its new methodology led to more major incidents being counted, which are incidents that lead to 50 or more delays. For this reason, this report focuses on comparisons of 2019 and 2023 separately from comparisons of 2024 and 2025.

The Subway Action Plan helped lower the number of major incidents to 586 in 2019 from an average of 900 annually in the previous four years. In 2020, partly as a result of reduced subway service due to overnight cleaning and ridership being decimated by the pandemic, major incidents dropped by 45%. Major incidents increased by 66% to 534 in 2023 as ridership returned and service increased but were still below 2019 levels. Through June 2025, there have been 385 major incidents, 5% more than the same period in 2024. The causes of delay have shifted during this time:

• 192 major incidents were caused by people on the tracks or stoppages for a police/medical response in 2023, 32% more than the 145 in 2019. Comparing the first six months of 2025 with the same period in 2024, these incidents have decreased 19%, potentially due to the continued partnership between the MTA and the New York Police Department.
• 128 major incidents were caused by signal problems in 2023, 32% fewer than in 2019. These incidents were down 6% through June 2025 compared to through June 2024.
• 44 major incidents were caused by subway car problems in 2023, 12% lower than in 2019. The number of these incidents have nearly tripled from 27 to 77 in the first six months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024 predominately on the E, F and R lines.

The fact that subway car problems are the fastest rising cause of major incidents highlights the need to carry out upgrades to the subway's rolling stock.

On-time performance varies widely on the 21 subway lines where the MTA tracks it. Four had better than 87% on-time performance last year, with the L train in the lead at 91.9%. It helped that the top four had relatively newer cars and that the L train has Communications-Based Train Control signals that enable trains to run closer together at faster speeds. The B train had the worst performance at 64.2% OTP.

Causes of the delays also vary by subway line. Of nearly 38,000 delays on the F train last year, 13,000 were due to planned track maintenance, which the MTA has control over as it is often related to capital project work, which slows trains to accommodate work crews. Nearly one-third of the 37,000 delays on the N train were due to infrastructure and equipment problems, including over 4,000 delays caused by signal problems.

There were more than 71,000 delays last year caused by public misconduct or crime leading to a police response. This caused 11% of the delays on the 6 train, which had the most delays of any line in 2024 (38,898). DiNapoli's analysis of 311 calls that may correlate to such incidents found more than 1,000 complaints on the 2, R, F, E, A and 6 trains last year.

Report
Trends in New York City Subway Delays

Related Work
Annual Update: MTA's Debt Profile
State Comptroller's NYC 311 Monitoring Tool