[ricardoreis]

Agreed - I don't need numbers to tell me how unpleasant the daily experience of riding the subway in NYC has become.

I was merely responding to someone else who brought up a numbers-based argument only to find out that they... apparently don't have any.

[dionidium]

I don't have access to any numbers you don't. I've tried to describe the ways in which I think the numbers can be used to tell a misleading and unnecessarily apocalyptic story. If I've failed to make that case on the merits, then I'll have to live with that, but just for the record, the 20% figure I gave was plainly illustrative, not a quote of actual figures; your references to it demonstrate the power of the anchoring effect, but I'll happily clarify, again, that they were -- I think manifestly, but the communication failure is mine, if not -- randomly chosen to make a point, not culled from a stash of secret MTA data.

The mere fact that people from Rhode Island now believe that they won't be able to successfully use the subway to attend a concert is I think pretty strong evidence that the story has gotten away from us a bit. Nobody here, least of all me, wishes to downplay your commute.

[ricardoreis]

That's fine - non-quantitative (a.k.a. "gut") reasoning is a valid and useful cognitive tool (in certain contexts), in fact.

If I was to give a "gut" estimate for the overall deterioration of the subway service in recent years, though -- I'd peg it at closer to 30 or 40 percent than merely 20.