Designing New York City Subways' Key Performance Indicators to Improve Service Delivery and Operations

A balanced scorecard (BSC) is widely used in private industry and the public sector to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and to help achieve strategic outcomes. This concept is widely used in the transit industry for carrier-regulator contractual relationships and performance monitoring. After a fact-finding mission to Southeast Asia, New York City Transit (NYCT) adopted KPIs for continuous improvement of service delivery performance. Subway line-level KPIs based on BSC concepts were introduced in conjunction with a line general manager program and numerous initiatives for incremental performance management. After a reorganization that re-created functional departments—car equipment, stations, and rapid transit operations—BSC was applied at departmental levels and resulted in maintenance-oriented passenger environment survey (PES)-KPIs and operations-oriented service (S)-KPIs. Weightings of indicator subcomponents were assigned as a result of surveys of customer priorities. KPIs provided one numbe...