Another major malfunction on SkyTrain last night stranded passengers for three hours during the evening rush. It was so bad that some riders pried open the doors of their trains – stuck between stations – to walk. At Metrotown, the “bus bridge” setup to ferry passengers had a FIVE HOUR wait.

Amusingly, just minutes before the shutdown, well-paid SkyTrain president Fred Cummings tweeted this: “#SkyTrain is on time 95% of the time. #WhatsTheLink.”

“What’s the Link”? More like “Cue the Stink.” With the system ground to a halt, passengers ripped TransLink through a variety of social media channels for leaving them stranded, not communicating properly, and being unprepared. Plus one wonders how SkyTrain can be “on time 95% of the time” when it dooesn’t have a set schedule, save for the first and last trains of the day. Even TransLink’s own customer service people refer to SkyTrain as frequent, not scheduled.

Cummings made $293,443 in 2012.

If you think SkyTrain failures are happening more often nowadays, you’re right. Earlier this year, a blog called Life in New Westminster broke down thousands of tweets and other data to get to the bottom of SkyTrain performance. It’s an amazing piece of citizen journalism. His conclusion:

How good is SkyTrain reliability overall? Well, it really depends on how you look at the numbers. The optimist would say the combined system is operating normally 98.5% of the time, and the individual lines even better than that. The pessimist would say there's a significant issue every 2.5 days, and major issues lasting more than 45 minutes occur nearly three times a month.