With New York City’s new congestion pricing system now in place, Gov. Kathy Hochul rode the rails to Syosset last week, urging city-bound Long Island commuters to leave their cars at home and embrace “world-class” public transit.
On Long Island, the tolling program is expected to increase commuters’ reliance on the Long Island Rail Road. Weekday ridership climbed from about 77 percent of pre-pandemic levels in 2023 to roughly 80 percent last year.
Transit officials, meanwhile, are highlighting the improved service of the railway system, emphasizing a pro-public transit message to court suburban commuters looking to avoid the $9 toll to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. LIRR President Rob Free boasted that a higher percentage of trains operated on time last year than ever before.
“Our 95.6 percent on-time performance in 2024 is our highest non-Covid year in the history that we’ve been tracking on-time performance,” Free said.
An analysis of LIRR data over the past three years, however, combined with riders’ firsthand accounts, paints a fuller — and undeniably more complicated — picture.
The number of late trains nearly doubled from 2022 to 2023, from 8,691 to 17,064. The surge, Free contends, resulted from the increase in post-pandemic service over the last two years amid landmarks like the opening of Grand Central Madison terminal in 2023.
“We operated over 77,000 more trains in 2023 than in 2022,” Free said. “We’ve operated a little over 316,000 trains in 2024, compared to 302,000 trains in 2023. That’s a huge lift.”
The new service into Midtown Manhattan brought with it a complete overhaul of the system’s train schedules. Some service lines and connections were cut, while others added more frequent service.
By the end of November 2024, the number of late trains for the year dropped to 11,480, as disruptions eased — although the number of delays remained higher than in 2022.
Despite fears of commuter frustrations and confusion with the opening of the new terminal, the main cause of train delays in 2023 and 2024 wasn’t passenger-related interruptions. Instead, it was train operations — issues like scheduling conflicts, slow boarding and late departures. These were problems largely within the transit agency’s control that ate into the time passengers needed to board and disembark.
Other problems, like delays caused by train door malfunctions in an aging fleet, were up 79 percent in the first half of 2024, compared with the same period in 2023. And the much-needed upkeep of the LIRR’s ailing infrastructure, from signal repairs to track maintenance, has also been a major contributor to train delays over the past two years.
For his part, Free said that a “heightened focus on infrastructure maintenance” has helped, cutting switch failures by 31 percent in 2024, with further work focusing on improving safety and efficiency planned for this year — even if that means more delays.
LIRR trains are more punctual overall, but the average delay of a late train hasn’t gotten any shorter. Rather, wait times have held steady — between 11 and 12 minutes — over the past three years.
Given what he described as an “explosion” of service since the beginning of 2023, Free views this consistency in lateness as a sign of a functioning system. In the nation’s largest transit system, with lines of service so “interconnected that one hiccup on one of our branches can have systemwide impacts on our total operation, the on-time performance we are achieving is nothing short of a miracle,” he said.
Still, critics point out that the data on train delays misses a key detail: the agency’s “on or close to schedule” standard allows for a grace period of up to six minutes. Delays under six minutes aren’t counted, masking a significant portion of minor setbacks that can still disrupt commuters’ plans.
Riders like Sasha Hanson, who commutes from Valley Stream to her interior design job at Stonehill Taylor in Manhattan, contends that these unofficial hold-ups can be just as vexing when they cause missed connections, particularly at Jamaica Station.
“It gets obnoxious, especially when transfer delays hit at the last minute—usually right as you’re getting off the train,” Hanson said. “It’s not like you can avoid it ahead of time on your commute.”
Rider Kelly Doherty, an Island Park resident, argues that overall timing has improved since the installation of Grand Central Madison, “except the switch in Jamaica.”
Following the elimination of scheduled connections, the “trains won’t wait for you” at Jamaica, so Doherty opts to get off at Valley Stream to return home.
Free agrees that “the amount of trains that we operate through this terminal is a huge impediment to our operation,” saddled with speed switches installed “at the turn of the century.”
“We are looking to improve this situation by putting in higher speed switches, lengthening the platform, and installing a new signal system among other capacity improvements,” he said.
Despite delays, commuters interviewed at the Valley Stream station rated LIRR service as satisfactory overall, echoing last fall’s MTA survey, which found 76 percent of nearly 22,000 commuters surveyed were satisfied overall with their service. Yet those who spoke well of the railway also balked at the idea of higher fares.
“I don’t think fares should increase because it’s costing me a lot of money just to get to school,” said Raya Adiva, a Valley Stream resident and high school senior who depends on the LIRR to get to school in the city.
Adiva is irked that despite Rosedale station being only a 9-minute car ride away from the Valley Stream station, LIRR commuters shell out $6 more for peak tickets to Penn Station from Valley Stream.
The specter of more expensive fares looms over commuters as the MTA Board approves a $19.9 billion budget for 2025, which includes plans for a potential 4 percent hike in fares and tolls.
“What’s important to keep in mind is that the price of a monthly ticket is still cheaper now than it was in 2019,” said Free. “The way we institute fares is predictable, so our customers know when it’s coming. We’ve done an incredible job of maintaining cost and giving people good value for their money.”
Free declined to speculate on whether the increase is imminent or reveal how it might affect LIRR ticket prices. Still, MTA officials have continued to defend their policy of incremental fare hikes every two years—a practice adopted in 2010 to keep pace with inflation and prevent surprise fare hikes for riders.
A new fare increase “is adding on to the strain of just trying to get to work in the morning,” said Hanson. “It’s the same ripple effect of everything getting more and more expensive.”
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