The LIRR Today
@thelirrtoday.com
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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. Visit on the web at http://www.thelirrtoday.com/ Subscribe to e-mail list at http://lists.thelirrtoday.com/
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Reposted by The LIRR Today
twgood.bsky.social
Eliminating value of 10 ride #LIRR passes by reducing their validity period is shrinkflation. From 1 year to 6 months to ́nothing.
thelirrtoday.com
Average LIRR fares to/from Long Island are up 10% just in the last 5 years, and are going way higher in January. So MTA lecturing about others' fare hikes is the very personification of throwing stones in glass houses... www.thelirrtoday.com/2025/08/2024...
LIRR ridership recovery tells two very different stories
While the MTA and the Governor's office have been highlighting  LIRR's top-line, overall ridership inching back closer to pre-pandemic level...
www.thelirrtoday.com
Reposted by The LIRR Today
airlineflyer.net
0/3 working OMNY machines at Atlantic Terminal.

Truly remarkable how bad this has gotten. They shouldn’t be allowed to conduct fare enforcement until this situation improves.
thelirrtoday.com
The original sin with the DC Streetcar (same with the DC Circulator) was allowing it to be a one-off thing directly managed by the district instead of it being WMATA's responsibility

We have the same problem in NY...MTA gobbles up virtually every cent for transit in the region & suffocates the rest
thelirrtoday.com
I thought there was one right before he took office during the financial crisis (MTA raised fares in 2008 and 2009).

MTA has had plenty of hidden fare hikes, this year especially. I have been meaning to do a comparison of average fares with the NTD data.
thelirrtoday.com
Average LIRR fares to/from Long Island are up 10% just in the last 5 years, and are going way higher in January. So MTA lecturing about others' fare hikes is the very personification of throwing stones in glass houses... www.thelirrtoday.com/2025/08/2024...
LIRR ridership recovery tells two very different stories
While the MTA and the Governor's office have been highlighting  LIRR's top-line, overall ridership inching back closer to pre-pandemic level...
www.thelirrtoday.com
thelirrtoday.com
MTA CEO Janno Lieber said today that NJTransit "raised prices by over 20%"...so I guess we are just making stuff up now. www.youtube.com/live/cFRc_1t... (32 min)

Even with NJTransit's 15% fare hike last year, they have still managed to keep fares significantly lower than the MTA since 2010...
Reposted by The LIRR Today
ibirdsometimes.bsky.social
I live near the first stop on two bus lines. I learned early that I need to get there five minutes before the scheduled arrival.
Reposted by The LIRR Today
zlwichter.bsky.social
As someone who gets on the Q80/10 at the Kew Gardens terminal multiple times a week, I can verify that the posted schedule bears almost no resemblance to the actual departure times on either route
thelirrtoday.com
Don't need billions in tax/toll subsides to make bus drivers use a watch and a timetable (or to fire those that can't manage this simple task)

Want people to _choose_ to ride/pay for your service? Must get the basics right. MTA & most others in the US don't b/c they don't care.
thelirrtoday.com
Circling back to this, I've been watching the real-time feeds and have been seeing this across a ton of routes and all 5 boroughs

It's tough to feel sorry for transit agencies facing fiscal cliffs when the people running them are so bad at basic fundamentals of their jobs. bsky.app/profile/airl...
airlineflyer.net
I have been watching this closely recently. Bus drivers routinely depart their first stop 2-5 minutes early, predictably. It’s like they operate on a schedule totally different than what’s public. It’s maddening.
thelirrtoday.com
I am not a fan of the "City Terminal Zone" designation at all, it's too amorphous. The reverse-colors they use on the Solari signs for the terminals at Jamaica (red on white for NYK, blue on white for GCT, green on white for ATL) is very good and I wish they used the more consistently.
thelirrtoday.com
I am not a fan of this diagram map for the railroads. When the scale of the railroads is so much larger, the locations and spacing of the lines and stations matters quite a bit more. Yaphank and Riverhead look right next to each other on this map when they're 15 miles apart.
Reposted by The LIRR Today
airlineflyer.net
I have been watching this closely recently. Bus drivers routinely depart their first stop 2-5 minutes early, predictably. It’s like they operate on a schedule totally different than what’s public. It’s maddening.
thelirrtoday.com
This happened to me a couple of weeks ago too...I was going to try the Q80 to JFK, but that bus also left early on a Friday evening with zero traffic.

@mta.info should be finding these drivers (and the supervisors allegedly managing bus service headways) and discipline them.
thelirrtoday.com
It's almost 8pm, the streets of Lower Manhattan are deserted, and on a bus route running every 20 minutes the bus leaves from the FIRST STOP 4 minutes early.

There is truly not one ounce of competence to be found anywhere across the MTA's operations org chart...
thelirrtoday.com
Everyone was saying Mamdani had a ceiling in the primary until he broke through that the last 2ish weeks
thelirrtoday.com
In New York, rail and local transit have been under the same roof for 57 years, yet the MTA is still the ONLY mainline rail operator in the country that doesn't offer rail riders free/discounted transfers to local transit they operate! And there has never been any real effort to coordinate the two.
Reposted by The LIRR Today
ohhleary.bsky.social
I've taken 5 subway rides since Monday. The OMNY fare cap tracker is only showing that I've taken four, and my ride history is only showing I've taken two. This system is beyond useless.
Reposted by The LIRR Today
ohhleary.bsky.social
Oh cool, my OMNY fare cap window changed from a Tuesday start to a Monday start with no explanation.
thelirrtoday.com
But it is mobile ticketing that is causing fare collection failures!!
Reposted by The LIRR Today
ndhapple.bsky.social
MONEY TRAIN TO THE GAME: "The MTA would have to spend at least $3 million in contracted union fees to provide the same special game-day service to Citi Field as Metro-North gives Yankee fans to go to the House that Ruth Built, data obtained by Streetsblog shows." nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/10/08/m...
MONEY TRAIN: How LIRR Unions 'Game' The System - Streetsblog New York City
An old work rule means that the MTA would have to pay millions of dollars just to provide a little extra service after special events like Mets games or the Ryder Cup.
nyc.streetsblog.org
thelirrtoday.com
Like some of the other work rules, there are workarounds they don't bother to try. All of these events are planned in advance, so they can write the extra trains into the crew book assignments like they do with the Holdiay Eve and seasonal trains, but then it'll impact OTP & they care more abt that
thelirrtoday.com
Most of these runs are pulled off the extra list, which doesn't cost anything extra. Which is probably the same that Metro-North is doing...it's unlikely they are running extra round-trips to Poughkeepsie or New Haven on OT.