If you've ever doubted the city's reasons for building the Second Avenue subway, there's now more evidence that the project estimated to cost $20 billion and launched in 2007 is necessary to take some of the pressure off the Lexington-Avenue lines on Manhattan's East Side.
Riders on the 4,5 and 6 lines requested more than 54,420 "subway delay verifications," or excuse notes for tardiness, from the MTA in 2014, according to MTA data obtained by DNAinfo. That's more requests than the the combined number of requests for the lines ranked sixth through 10th, and roughly 42 percent of all the forms straphangers submitted for verifications they might give their bosses. The 4 line led the pack, with 22,295 rider requests for excuse notes.
The 4, 5, and 6 lines were also among the five most frequently delayed trains in 2014, with 28.7 percent, 31.2 percent and 32.5 percent of trains running late on each line, respectively, according to the MTA. The 6 line saw the most "major delays" in 2014, with 13.1 percent of trains arriving 100 percent later than they were scheduled to.
The MTA expects the Second Avenue subway to ease congestion on the Lexington-Avenue lines, which serves an average of 1.95 million riders a day, MTA spokesperson Kevin Ortiz said. (For some perspective, that's about 35 percent of the 5.5 million riders taking the subway every day in 2013.)
"Once phase one of the Second Avenue subway is done," supposedly in late 2016, "that will shift 220,000 of those customers over," Ortiz told DNAinfo.
