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Which MBTA subway line is most likely to leave you waiting?

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MBTA officials recently issued a detailed report card on the Red Line and the challenges it faces, including trains struggling to stay on schedule. But the Red Line isn't the only line with tardy trains.

One metric the T uses to track the reliability of its system is a measure of the percentage of passengers who did not have to wait on the platform for longer than the scheduled times between trains.

The heavy-rail subway line with the worst such stat in recent years has been the Orange Line, according to data from T performance reports.

During fiscal 2015, the 12-month period that concluded at the end of June 2015, only 78.1 percent of Orange Line passengers waited no longer than the scheduled times between trains.

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On the Red Line, 84.8 percent of passengers waited for the scheduled amount of time or less.

The Blue Line had the best performance at 91 percent.

The MBTA's goal across all three lines is for 90 percent of passengers to wait no longer than the time between trains.

All three lines posted worse passenger wait time statistics in fiscal 2015, compared with the prior year.

The Orange Line had a 3.58 percentage point drop, the Blue has a 2.54 percentage point drop, and the Red has a 1.26 percentage point drop.

The widespread decline in train timeliness was attributed to winter weather that strained the system for several weeks, dragging down the yearly stat.

"Across the system, wait times increased significantly in February 2015, which had a notable impact on the annual average. This was due to the impacts of multiple snow storms," a T report said.

The following chart from another T report shows passenger wait times in 2013 and 2014, with the Blue, Red, and Orange lines occupying the same ranking relative to each other.

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The agency has at least one other way of measuring the timeliness of its subway trains, and since September it has published that data online in weekly performance reports. That number was used in the Red Line report card.

The T has not yet tracked on-time performance for the Green Line, though the agency expects it will begin collecting enough data to do so by March 2016.


Matt Rocheleau can be reached at matthew.rocheleau@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @mrochele