For example, if you’re traveling from Union Square to Grand Central, the 4, 5, and 6 lines will all get you there, so your effective wait time would be shorter than if you had to rely on one specific line.) How long will you have to wait for your train?

Note also that in some cases, different lines can serve as substitutes. See the appendix for a more mathematical treatment on converting between time between trains and expected wait time. (Note that expected wait time is different from time between trains. I’ll have a bit more to say on that in a moment… Systemwide CBTC is the cornerstone of the recently announced ambitious plan to fix the subways.

The 7 train, the second most reliable according to my data, is currently running “partial” CBTC, and is slated for full CBTC in 2018. The L train is also the only line that uses modern communications-based train control (CBTC), which allows trains to operate in a more automated fashion. The top four trains with the shortest waits-the L, 7, 1, and 6-are the only trains that run on dedicated tracks, which presumably helps avoid delays due to trains from other lines merging in and out on different schedules. The chart below shows how long you should expect to wait for each train line, assuming you arrive on the platform at a random time on a weekday between 7:00 AM and 8:00 PM. Which NYC subway lines have the longest wait times? Over the past 5 months, I’ve collected and processed some 24 million stops’ worth of this data to try to make sense of New York’s vast and troubled subway system. Although there’s no official record of when trains actually stopped at each station, the countdown clock data can be used to approximate. If you’ve been on a New York City subway platform since January 2018, you should have noticed a countdown clock that displayed an estimate of when the next train would arrive.

New york city subway lines