William M. Wheeler, who as a New York mass transit official oversaw the strategic planning that inaugurated the MetroCard, belatedly spawned the first phase of the Second Avenue subway and dared, by recommending countdown clocks, to introduce the presumption that subways and buses would arrive punctually, died on Saturday at his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. He was 69.

The cause was coronary artery disease, which had previously been undetected, his son, William Wheeler III, said

As the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s deputy director of strategic planning from 1986 to 1992, director of planning and development for the next decade and, since 2002, director of special project development and planning, Mr. Wheeler did not have much of a public profile, but he was persuasive within the agency and before its board.

Long before sandhogs bored the tunnels he conceived or highway workers installed barriers to unclog the bus lanes he championed, Mr. Wheeler assembled the statistical nuts and bolts needed to assess the region’s future transportation needs.