Guest Post: A Weather-Ruined OTP So Far

Last week we took a look back at the systemwide OTP for 2013.  While the LIRR failed to meet their OTP goals in 2013, they are off to an even rougher start in 2014.  The post below takes a more localized look at the LIRR's OTP from the beginning of the year through the February schedule change (ending on February 23, 2014).  As I alluded to last week, the numbers in these first 8 weeks alone are significantly worse than we experienced in all of last year. This winter has not been nice to us thus far, with two days relegating to a weekend schedule, and quite a few absolutely horrendous rush hours. Amtrak wasn't nice to the LIRR much either, with a few East River Tunnel/HAROLD failures gumming things up.

The full set of data for January 1 through February 23, 2014 appears at the bottom of the post. Because I did this daily instead of 365 days at once, I was able to capture the data in much greater detail. As a result, weekend service and special schedules are accounted for. However, there is still a minor difference of less than 100 trains between my data and the LIRR Committee Materials, thus these OTP numbers may not match up. The error is expected to be minor, for tens of thousands of trains operated in these 8 weeks.

Note that when the LIRR operated a weekend schedule due to the snow, OTP is calculated as if it were any weekend day. Delay explanations for February will not be available until mid-March, when the LIRR officially releases them in advance of the March LIRR Committee Meeting of the MTA Board.

Days

The two worst days in the entire year of 2013 had an OTP of 72.8% and 3,378 delay minutes, respectively. In the first 8 weeks of 2014, we have already experienced 2 days that have exceeded both of those values. Of the nine days that had an OTP below 80%, six were directly due to inclement weather, and of the remaining four, two were due to Amtrak failures, and the last was the ice storm whose primary delays resulted from train 2013 suffering a fuse box fire at Bellerose, forcing a single-track operation of the Main Line for most of the rush hour, with the last hour of morning rush operations suffering extreme 100+ minute delays because both tracks had to be closed to allow passengers to be rescued. Much like in 2013, the major delays so far have mainly been the result of Main Line and Amtrak incidents.

The new lows for single-day OTP percentage and delay minutes set in 2014 have been 62.2% OTP (a nearly 10% drop from last year's worst!) and over 4,250 delay minutes (just short of 1,000 minutes more than last year's worst day). The LIRR has yet to eek out a perfect day where all trains have arrived ontime, be it a weekday or weekend.

It is also worth noting that, despite several days of inclement weather, the LIRR only wimped out and ran a weekend schedule on snow days twice this year and there was no point where all service was suspended across major portions of the system, so it at least looks like the LIRR is trying to go back to running a real railroad that doesn't close up shop as soon as the white stuff piles up.

Rush Hours

Beginning with this period, I calculated the figures for rush hours both as the traditional peak-fare trains, and an "augmented" rush hour that also includes reverse peak service. Because most of the trains' run times are spent on Long Island, I designated the reverse peak rush hours one hour offset from the standard rush hour (westbound trains, or their earliest possible connections, arriving New York between 5pm and 9pm, and eastbound trains, or their latest possible connections, leaving New York between 5am and 9am). I also included the few off peak trains that leave Penn after 4pm but before the "official" start of the PM peak rush hour at 4:12pm.

Below are the worst five (augmented) rush hours, both by delay minutes and OTP through February 23:

Day	Rush	Cancel- lations	Termin- ations	Delays	Delay mins	Runs	OTP
1/21	PM	16	1	146	2,444	193	15.5%
1/29	PM	28	19	98	1,485	204	28.9%
2/21	PM	13	0	93	1,606	194	45.4%
2/5	AM	12	4	85	2,492	190	46.8%
1/7	AM	3	0	94	1,165	190	48.9%

In 2013, the lowest OTP for a non-augmented rush hour was 36.2% and 2,952 delay minutes. Luckily, we didn't break the second record, but both 1/21 and 1/29 broke the first number significantly (with OTP's of 15.5% and 28.9%, respectively).  And if you exclude the reverse-peak trains from the equation, January 21st's PM rush had a scary 11.5% OTP, while that on 1/29 had a 31.5% OTP.

The significant delays on January 29th and February 21st were the direct result of Amtrak failures and the delays on the remaining rush hours could primarily be attributed to inclement weather. And the LIRR hasn't been improving very much into February.  The total AM peak OTP for weekdays February 1-21 was a whopping ten percentage points lower than PM peak OTP for that same period, which goes against the normal trend of the PM peak performing worse.  This can likely be attributed to the slew of nighttime and AM weather events.

Trains

Say your daily commute home was the 4:52pm flyer train from New York to Babylon (train #148), and you made that commute every day that the LIRR ran a weekday schedule in January. You would have arrived on time only once. That train's OTP for the month? 5.3%! But what if you were a night-shift worker and took the 11:22pm out of Port Jefferson every day? You would have also been on time only once from February 1 through 21. The table below shows all trains with either less than 50% OTP and/or more than 250 delay minutes throughout the whole 1/1-2/23. Notice that all but two are Main Line trains!

Train	Origin	Destin- nation	Cancel- lations	Termin- nations	Delays	Delay mins	Runs	OTP
665	Port Jeff	Huntington	0	0	26	285	33	21%
148	NY	Babylon	3	0	23	252	33	21%
1715	Huntington	NY	0	1	19	310	33	39%
2041	Ronk’ma	NY	0	1	18	258	33	42%
615	NY	Port Jeff	0	2	16	327	33	45%
564	NY	Oyster Bay	0	0	18	201	33	45%
2025	Ronk’ma	NY	2	0	16	196	33	45%
676	Hicksville	Port Jeff	1	0	16	294	33	48%
2061	Ronk’ma	NY	1	1	15	210	33	48%
617	Port Jeff	Hicksville	1	2	14	153	33	48%
2008	NY	Ronk’ma	0	0	15	430	33	55%
160	NY	Babylon	0	0	15	261	33	55%

Many of these trains are "repeat offenders" and were ranked among the worst performing trains in 2013 for pretty much the same reasons. However, there are several new additions to this list:

• Train 2041: The only midday train on the list, the 11:11am from Ronkonkoma to New York train has no obvious reason to be late so often and so much. Hopefully this is a one-time anomaly that will go away.
• Train 2025: Traveling at the height of rush hour, the 7:32am from Ronkonkoma to New York, this train appears to be the victim of HAROLD congestion and having to pick up the load when the very crowded train 2309 (the 7:58am train from Bethpage) is canceled, as it was a few times so far this year.
• Trains 148 and 160: The 4:52pm and 5:59pm New York to Babylon express peak trains. These suffer significant congestion-related delays.  The way the Montauk Branch is set up in the evening rush hour, all eastbound trains have to be routed on track 2 so the westbound track can be kept open for westbound equipment trains.  As a result, trains proceed east perfectly in order, one behind each other, in fairly close-spaced intervals.  One minor hiccup can cause minor delays to amplify quickly.  Once one train takes a couple minute hit, the train behind it will get knocked down to limited or medium speed for a little while because it's getting too close, and then everything else will get bunched up after that.  These two trains represent the end of the pileups as there is a recovery gap of roughly 20 minutes on the branch following each of these trains so the delays can be contained, but being as they're the last trains before these small recovery periods, they often get the full extent of the delay.
• Train 2008: This train, in my opinion, the worst train to be forced to rely on. The 7:39am from Penn to Ronkonkoma, it's the second train through the Main Line after the AM rush gives up one track (first revenue train). Every time something goes even the tiniest bit wrong on the Main Line, this train needs to wait until whatever disruption is cleared up and most of the westbounds have reached Queens Village. When the Mainline is reduced to a single track, this train can easily operate an hour or more late. This was shown several times in this period, with signal and switch problems at NASSAU 1, train 2013's incident in Bellerose, and 507 breaking down in Mineola all causing substantial delays to this train. Similarly, Train 617's delay minutes often rack up because it has to wait at DUKE for a late 606, which is two trains behind 2008. Train 606 itself has plenty of schedule padding so it doesn't arrive in Port Jefferson late every day, but it still experiences significant delays when the Mainline messes up, and as a result, train 617 gets buried as well.

There is a small bright side to the punctuality numbers this period, as there were 73 trains that did not incur a single delay during this period.

With all hope, this nasty winter will ease up soon and conditions will improve in the spring. These numbers are sure to have a sizeable impact on year-end 2014 OTP, and we haven't even hit summer and fall trackwork season yet (there are more ESA outages coming!). Luckily the snow storm heading our way tonight is expected to take a left-turn someplace and not impact us that bad, so hopefully tomorrow morning's rush hour will go better.

Included below is the full table of OTP data, calculated by train.  You can switch between different sorting styles by using the tabs at the top of the box.  To view the spreadsheet in a different window, you can click here. 



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A special thanks to Sunny Zheng for all his work on this post!