A year after The Post and other news outlets reported that labor shortages were causing train delays and cancellations, the MTA are still struggling to deploy trains and buses, officials said.
New York City Transit President Rich Davey addressed ongoing challenges to "crew availability" that caused a quarter of weekday trains, according to MTA data, in a memo Friday. He said he plans to set up a "working group" to Postponed to June.
"The most important factor in expanding service offerings is maintaining consistent and adequate staffing," he wrote Davey in a note, which is based on The Post. has obtained.
The MTA's operational workforce has shrunk significantly at the depths of the COVID-19 crisis, with a surge in retirements and a hiring freeze by authorities to offset lost revenue.
Authorities have since hired more people, but have not yet reached the number of bus and train managers employed before the pandemic, officials said.
The agency is expected to be fully deployed on buses by late summer and on trains by early 2023, officials said.
In the meantime, the Working Group will take steps to encourage good attendance.
The "Attention and Awareness" program, which was piloted at two bus stops in 2019, will resume, officials said.
The program aims to provide social services and other resources to support workers who are injured on the job for any reason, and during the pilot period Employee availability was shown to increase by 25% of his.
"It's not just about hiring people, it's about creating a safe working environment for employees," officials said.
"The bottom line is that more people are needed and trains and buses should be able to operate when they are fully staffed so that these waiting times and service disruptions can be reduced or eliminated.
The Post announced in June 2021 that thousands of subway and bus reported that it was forced to suspend operations.
By December, officials had declared a partial victory, but since then the number of crew-related delays has increased by 7%.
Transportation officials report that he experienced nearly 33,000 delays on weekdays in June, the latest month for which statistics are available. About 8,676 of them were due to crew shortages, more than any other category.
Over the weekend, the percentage of delays due to staffing was even higher at 32.6%.
