Tuesday, February 11, 2025
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 hom 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.
Three years of growth and growing pains
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.
LIRR’s own operations are main culprit for delays
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.
Historic on-time rate, but average delays stay the same
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 give LIRR high marks — but not for fares
Riders like James Wilkins, who commutes from Lynbrook to Manhattan, said he enjoys taking the train for its convenience, but the number of delays, and unpredictable prices, make it difficult to justify even higher fares.
“The prices fluctuate so much depending on where you are and when you get off,” Wilkins said. “And the delays have been so much more frequent.”
Other passengers at the Lynbrook station agreed, and some younger riders suggested student and youth-oriented discounts.
Most said that the LIRR needs more noticeable improvements, like promptness, before a fare hike is warranted. “I’d like to see more consistency,” Wilkins said.
Additional reporting by Ainsley Martinez.
