If you live in New York City, it’s likely you’ve been stuck underground for several minutes or waited not-so-patiently for a delayed train at least a handful of times over the last few years. But new research suggests that the subway’s chronic challenges affect some New Yorkers more than others.
The subway worst-case scenarios are much worse for low-income New Yorkers than they are for wealthier subway riders, according to an analysis published Wednesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The researchers looked at how many minutes riders in subway-dependent neighborhoods experienced poor service, a measure they call downtime, during the subway delays.
What they found: New Yorkers in the lowest income quartiles of the group they evaluated — or those with an income of about $36,460 a year experienced 42 minutes of downtime during the worst subway delays. Those in the upper quartile, or making about $77,020, experienced 35 minutes of downtime.
The analysis adds to the growing body of evidence that subway delays, which affect and annoy New Yorkers of all stripes, mirror the inequality of the city overall. “It’s in line with really what we’ve seen,” said Jaqi Cohen, the campaign coordinator of the Straphanger Campaign, an initiative of the New York chapter of the Public Interest Research Group focused on public transit. “Poor transit disproportionately burdens low-income New Yorkers.”
The analysis also noted that the times when low-income New Yorkers are commuting contribute to the likelihood that they’ll experience subway delays. They’re more likely to commute to work at night or during other off-hours when construction and other work is taking place.
The researchers point to a few reasons why low-income New Yorkers suffer so acutely from subway delays. For one, residents often have to pay a premium to live closer to a subway station, so New Yorkers who need to travel further to get to the subway are more likely have low incomes. That makes their overall commute longer, which means there’s more opportunity to be subject to delays.
It can also be expensive to live near stations with multiple subway lines so low-income New Yorkers are less likely to be able to change their route if one line is experiencing a delay.
In addition to actually suffering longer delays, low-income workers are often in a more precarious position at work that subway delays only exacerbate. For example, a worker who is paid hourly could experience serious consequences for being late. New Yorkers living in lower-income ZIP codes were 14% more likely to be reprimanded at work over a subway delay, according to a report prepared last year by the office of the New York City Comptroller, Scott Stringer.
Even though low-income riders are more likely to suffer from subway delays, the issue is costing even those who don’t ride the subway. Stringer’s office estimated that New York loses out on $389 million annually due to subway delays.
“We are a city that heavily depends on transit,” Cohen said. “The more and more difficult it becomes for low-income New Yorkers to access transit, the more they are shoved to the outskirts of our civic life.”
