Train Delays, the New Subway Plan and the Perception of Time

NEW YORK — Time is a funny thing. All minutes are 60 seconds long. But some last longer than others. And there may be no minute that lasts as long or causes as much distress as a minute spent on an unmoving New York City subway train, somewhere in a dark tunnel, bereft of explanation or knowledge when motion will resume.

Scientists who study time and our perception of it have multiple explanations for this phenomenon.

Behavioral economists speak of “loss aversion.” “If I give you $10 and take it away from you, that feels a lot worse than me not giving it to you in the first place,” said Mark Dean, an economics professor at Columbia University. “When there’s a stalled subway train, you’ve thought you had this time, and you have that time being taken away from you.”

Systems-management scholars talk about the difference between “filled time” and “empty time,” and the paradoxical finding that how long people expect to wait for something determines how they experience the wait.

“In the service industries, one of the axioms is to manage people’s expectations and always provide service at a level higher than expectation,” even if that means overstating expected wait times, said Richard Larson, a professor at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society. “The thing about the subway is that if the train stops in the middle of the tunnel, if you’re not told that the maximum wait time will be, say, one minute, it could be infinity.”

Neuroscientists focus on the brain’s need for predictability. “When it comes to things that are rewarding or punishing, things that are randomly timed are more intense,” said David Eagleman, a Stanford researcher, who hosted the PBS series “The Brain.” “This is because the brain is a prediction engine and is always trying to tell the future.”

And so, with random train stoppages proliferating, the lords of the subway have proposed a deal:

They will take away subway service on long segments of several lines at a time on nights and weekends — thousands of trainless minutes a week, for several years, so that they can install new signal systems. In return, they say they will make those random delays go away or at least significantly diminish their occurrence by modernizing the subway’s signals within 10 years, rather than the 40 years they had said it would take.

The plan, unveiled Wednesday by the subway head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Andy Byford, would cost $19 billion and need to clear steep political hurdles.

To Eagleman, it sounded pretty good. “What we don’t like are bad surprises,” he said. “As long as something is predictable and you know something is going to be shut down all weekend, you can plan around it.”

Riders are not so sure.

Richard Safo, a warehouse worker from the Bronx, knows the feeling of being held hostage by time bandits. He has a long, two-train commute to take his son to prekindergarten in the East Village.

“If he doesn’t get there by 9:30, they won’t let him in,” Safo, 24, said as he bounced along on the F in Manhattan on Wednesday afternoon. “My son hates the subway.”

The train mysteriously halted, somewhere between 63rd and 57th Streets. “Attention passengers,” the voice over the speaker said, followed by garble.

“This is what we go through every day,” Safo said.

But sacrificing nights and weekends in the name of long-term reliability still held no appeal for him: “I’d rather wait five or 10 minutes than not be able to get where I need to go,” he said.

Jennifer Bartlett, emerging from the Vernon Boulevard-Jackson Avenue 7 station in Queens into the dazzling afternoon, cast her vote for Byford’s plan. Bartlett, 48, is an advocate for transit access for the disabled, and that very morning, she said, she was on her way to the MTA meeting when her train stopped in the tunnel just shy of Grand Central.

Minutes went by — maybe seven, maybe 10. “I actually had an anxiety attack,” she said. “It was long enough to feel nervous, which I don’t usually do.”

Bartlett lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on the G line, which is often suspended at night already, and she has learned to deal with it and take cabs when necessary.

“The subways have to be fixed,” said Bartlett, who has written opinion columns about disability for The Times. “I don’t see the other options.”

Waiting for a downtown F at 42nd Street Wednesday, Joseph Corrado, an elevator contractor, studied the electronic arrival board. It said a train was coming in two minutes. The board refreshed and suddenly two minutes had changed to nine. More uncertainty. His phone rang.

“Hey I’m waiting for the F train,” he said. “Where are you?” Then without warning, a train appeared.

Corrado wrote back later to say that his train had dead-ended several stations short of its advertised destination, causing him to have to walk half an hour and be late for a meeting.

This put him in mind of another species of time altogether.

“In due time, we will all fade out, and new generations of youth and young adults will take our place in the work world,” he wrote. “These upgrades are needed, and so while I wouldn’t say I would be happy” losing nighttime service for years, “I will say I would be willing to sacrifice for the greater good. This is the price of progress, and someone has to pay.”