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The LIRR Today
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The latest news on commuting and travelling across Long Island. Opinions are the personal views of their author. Not an official LIRR account.

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Reposted by The LIRR Today
Let’s be courteous and ride responsibly!

Operate trains on time and hold connecting trains when late, so customers can have an opportunity to make it to their destination.
December 8, 2025 at 4:35 PM
And _real_ record high ridership, not BS "post-pandemic records" we hear about from the nation's other mass transit agencies when everyone else moved on with life some years ago.
Congratulations to Seattle's Sound Transit, America's fastest-growing train network, which is opening an 8-mile, 3-station extension to Federal Way today!

This is the system's 4th new segment opened in less than 2 years, continually pushing ridership up to new record highs!
December 6, 2025 at 9:17 PM
Reposted by The LIRR Today
And also, I was just at Times Square where they were doing another "shift change" at 3pm (with six people waiting) that was estimated to take 20-30 minutes.

They are so so not ready for a couple hundred thousand people digging up expired cards at the end of the month
December 4, 2025 at 8:44 PM
Reposted by The LIRR Today
LMAO no. He means specifically, at the stations listed, there may be multiple booths but only one "CSC" can do Metrocard balance transfers, with only one reader at a time, with an average of 1-2m per transaction and a lot longer if the irate customer doesn't like hearing their card demagnetized
December 4, 2025 at 8:43 PM
NYLCV's suggestion to create a integrated multimodal fare between NYCT, NYC Ferry, and Citi Bike is a great one...but MTA's OMNY screw-ups will make that impossible, or at least very impractical for the first year.
December 4, 2025 at 1:43 AM
Fare evasion is not a hardware problem, it's an enforcement problem (and also a fare pricing problem)

Germany has low fare evasion rates with no physical fare control barriers

Have true systemwide PoP enforcement. If people want to hop turnstiles and pay $100 fine, I don't care!
I was originally pretty ambivalent about these turnstile modifications. On the one hand, people hopping has grown to a significant issue. On the other, these are incredibly hostile, and say to normal passengers "we view you as a criminal," maybe even "the subway is a dangerous place."
You've probably seen them in the subway: spiky partitions, halfmoon hurdles on the turnstiles and a patrol of guards by the emergency doors (with a 15-sec delay). Take a closer look at how the MTA hopes to cut down its $1B fare evasion problem
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/n...
December 3, 2025 at 5:56 PM
Is this why they are trying to rebrand it as the "Midtown Bus Terminal"?
December 2, 2025 at 8:24 PM
People may not verbalize it, but fares and fare policy have pretty big impacts on ridership.

And it is a far easier dial for transit agencies to turn than actually improving the service...
I don't quite get the disconnect between current transit riders who consistently rank the cost of fares as a low priority and the staff of local advocacy groups who seem to think it's THE most important issue?

I guess that's what donors are interested in?
December 2, 2025 at 1:23 AM
Reposted by The LIRR Today
I'm glad they have that option for those people. But putting the future of new york city transit behind a technology that can't let you buy fares in time based increments like the rest of the civilized world is comically incompetent, even for the MTA. Insane that we're pushing this through anyway
December 1, 2025 at 9:08 PM
Better weekend PATH service will be a huge, long overdue improvement—but even with these changes fully implemented PATH will be running LESS service than they were in 2019.

Weekday peak service will still be down slightly, and weekday off-peak service has been cut by 20% since 2019.
A few weeks ago, PATH announced a series of service expansions that will finally reverse this trend. Though paired with a rather steep fare increase, these changes will finally put weekend PATH service levels above where they were 25 years ago. Huge congrats to all the advicates who made this happen
November 30, 2025 at 4:15 PM
@alonlevy.bsky.social Did you have a post in the past showing general flows of cross-CBD commutes across NY (e.g. Queens to the Bronx, LI to NJ, etc.) or was that in the ETA report? Can't seem to find it.
November 30, 2025 at 12:48 AM
NJTransit's naming rights deal with BetMGM for the Meadowlands rail spur has come to an end, so now the line shows up as white text on a white background on NJT's app 🤦‍♂️
November 28, 2025 at 8:24 PM
Maybe one day MTA will find a better balance between running skimpy Metro-North service where every train is jam packed and regular weekday LIRR service where trains are barely a third full...

But it's late mobile ticket activations that are bankrupting the MTA!!
November 28, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Metro-North publishes a list of trains that will sport its decorated 'holdiay trains'. The best LIRR can come up with is a "random rotation" of trains. Pretty good euphemism for how the railroad is run 😉 bsky.app/profile/mtal...
It will operate on a random rotation of regularly scheduled trains all times of day and night.

Hop on and take in the magic of the season!
November 27, 2025 at 10:58 PM
LIRR and Metro-North are sunsetting email-based mobile ticking accounts, requiring riders create new accounts tied to their Apple/Google accounts or phone numbers.

Presumably this is to make it more difficult for riders to create new accounts after the railroads block them for late activations...
November 27, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Very nice to see police in an accessible location (instead of a walled off district office behind barriers and storefront)

But we should also be having a conversation about why MTA has not filled so many vacant retail spaces across the system...rents too high or is MTA a bad landlord?
November 26, 2025 at 3:43 PM
Reposted by The LIRR Today
Wild that in the next few years GO will likely overtake the 24/7, higher frequency, and much larger LIRR in daily ridership. Can only imagine how much higher it will be as service continues to grow to rapid transit levels.

Fare and service integration and a *nice* system clearly help.
November 26, 2025 at 1:38 AM
The NJT 62 bus hasn't been nearly as reliable/good since they opened Terminal A and it blew the headways and travel times out of whack with this convoluted route around the airport...
November 26, 2025 at 1:48 AM
Yawn. Waste of money when they should just bite the bullet and grade separate this ramp (and segregate exiting and through traffic onto different roadways) so motorists going from the northbound RM Causeway to the Sagtikos don't have to merge across 3 lanes of traffic www.newsday.com/long-island/...
Southern State Parkway construction on connector to Sagtikos complete, state DOT says
The project added safety improvements to the connector from the eastbound Southern State.
www.newsday.com
November 26, 2025 at 12:29 AM
Reposted by The LIRR Today
Transit operators can’t control the traffic and the schedule, but they can control if they leave the terminal on time.
Currently sitting on a @mta.info bus at the origin terminal 6 minutes past schedule departure time while the driver stands outside finishing her cigarette and phone conversation. There's zero reason for this.
November 25, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Reposted by The LIRR Today
I love walking through an iron maiden every time I pay (sometimes twice, thanks OMNY) to use the delayed and dirty service
November 25, 2025 at 2:39 PM
For every minute/dollar transit agencies spend on fare evasion, they should be required to spend two minutes/$2 on how they are actually improving service so people might actually _want_ to pay for it...
November 25, 2025 at 2:35 PM
The data consistency in US DOT's National Transit Database is pretty garbage...
November 24, 2025 at 1:50 AM