The LIRR Today

I don't get the framing of the story like this...if they could pin $18k in tolls on the guy obviously the socks on the plate didn't work.

MTA chief says Amtrak keeps delaying work to build 'goddamn train' in the Bronx MTA Chair Janno Lieber said Amtrak crews keep missing shifts, sparking chronic delays on a new Metro-North line that aims to fill in a Bronx transit desert.

Hmm........I wonder why Amtrak is not in a great hurry to have more Metro-North trains running on their portion of the NEC 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔 gothamist.com/news/mta-chi...

You can take the LIRR out of Penn Station, but you can't take the Penn Station out of the LIRR I was fortunate to have the opportunity to tour East Side Access a few times over the years it was under construction.  During one of the to...

There is plenty of seating at GCT already...on the trains! MTA needs to get its head out of its rear and let the passengers decide where they want to wait for their train: www.thelirrtoday.com/2025/08/gct-...

They do things like this at WTC all the time and it works out fine.

Metro-North has solo conductor trains, LIRR did too on the North Fork until about 10 years ago

With the main stations having fare gates, you could likely get away with just the conductor and the fare gates. The gates would catch most people on one end of the trip (either with a proper ticket or the higher exit fare) and if they miss some intermediate travelers it's not the end of the world.

But one of those sides has many billions in subsidies from the NY taxpayer to run good service and one doesn't.

The NYS VTL says vehicles with 15 or more seats can use bus lanes, though NYC's traffic regulations says "buses" without a super clear definition.

They are far too bad at their jobs to not be civil service employees

Here's a link to the Twitter thread if the screenshot is too garbled x.com/TheLIRRToday...

I don't know how MTA can seriously think OMNY is ready to be the sole payment method for NYCT when its customer service agents are telling people it doesn't work with the largest credit card network on Earth!

The disastrous OMNY rollout has been made avoidably worse by @mta.info's "customer service"

People MTA have running the phones are tremendously incompetent, and 5.5 yrs since launch we still get stories like this every 1-2 wks

Last yr took me 2 wks/2+ hrs on phone to resolve simple free xfer issue

From the OMNY community on Reddit Explore this post and more from the OMNY community

OMNY @mta.info customer service representatives tell a rider that OMNY doesn't work with Visa or American Express cards and that they should open up a new credit card to ride the Subway www.reddit.com/r/OMNY/s/pfg...

Tough to get anywhere on LIRR this weekend...
—Babylon service cut to hourly, now suspended east of Freeport
—Ronkonkoma service cut to hourly FMD-RON
—No trains east of Ronkonkoma
—No trains on West Hempstead Branch

From the Amtrak community on Reddit: There's gotta be a way to get Amtrak and Metro-North to play nice along the Hudson Line, right? Explore this post and more from the Amtrak community

Amtrak train arrives Poughkeepsie 4 minutes late, so Metro-North sends one of their southbound diesels out ahead if it. Falls behind schedule by nearly a half hour to Croton-on-Hudson. Childish dispatching by Metro-North. www.reddit.com/r/Amtrak/s/T...

A NotifyNYC alert that I received on my smartphone. It reads: "Due to a person struck by a train, L train service is suspended between Myrtle-Wyckoff Avs and Canarsie-Rockaway Pkwy. Consider alternate routes and allow for additional travel time."

The three-station pilot for platform screen doors, first announced in 2022, is nowhere to be seen.

I know it is treated as sacrosanct, but I am not a 24/7 service purist. 40 minute headways is almost worse than nothing. If they need to shut down overnight, fine. Start at 12m/1a, and __provide robust night bus service__ in its place.

Closing things down for shorter periods of time is less impactful (except in the case of Hoboken because PATH is especially incompetent)...so long as there is decent alternative service.

Problem is, other than Hoboken, the baseline level of transit in Hudson County sucks. bsky.app/profile/airl...

PATH—which has spent the last 15 years stripping off-peak service to the bone for trackwork—is now scheming up new ways to disrupt service... www.reddit.com/r/jerseycity...

Maybe do this BEFORE you remove MetroCard machines from almost every station. Fucking idiots.

It has been almost 3 weeks since I was last in the western hemisphere and I get an e-mail from the MTA saying they couldn't process an OMNY transaction. I look on the web portal, it says the charge declined was from FEBRUARY 2025.

How can we say MTA is not just out and out stealing from us now?

But MTA will keep issuing press releases and patting themselves on the back while nobody holds them accountable for ridership still being so low 5+ years post-pandemic, when virtually every other aspect of life has gone back to normal. Mismanagement through and through.

MTA is draining an extra $3.5 billion/year in new taxes and tolls from the wallets of New Yorkers so it no longer needs to care about growing ridership or powering the region's economy. They'll just go back to Albany with their tin cup when this inevitably hurts ridership.

A lot of people are going to be doing this math, and the response when they see how much their out of pocket costs—especially for the railroads—will be exactly this: I'll just ride less.

These fare policy changes are profoundly shortsighted and reckless of the MTA. www.reddit.com/r/LIRR/s/RuO...

Several cities use both proof of payment and turnstiles. Paris does in-system PoP checks on the Metro even though they have turnstiles.

And beyond the inherent pro-evasion incentivizes of introducing marginal costs to almost every trip under under fare capping, the MTA/Cubic’s flawed implementation has created a huge issue for inspecting fares (the inspectors are either unable or unwilling to figure out how to properly confirm that…

…marginal trips, and the huge explosion in fare evasion in recent years and the almost existential issues it poses for buses kinda vindicated that position.

Eh it’s not just that (although yes the MTA did use fare capping as an excuse to up the multiplier even more by getting rid of monthlies). I believe it was @alonlevy.bsky.social who made the point before it was rolled out that it encourages fare evasion by turning many $0 marginal trips into $3…

Anyway the MTA has bungled the whole thing in a bunch of interconnected ways and some are not strictly fare capping’s fault, HOWEVER, I would argue that there are essentially different “packages” to go down with fare collection, and the fare capping road is a distinct one from the continental…

I would bet there is at least a 60% chance that MTA is eliminating the 30 day pass because they couldn't figure out how to make the programming of multiple, concurrent caps work on the backend.

The MTA got a lot of things wrong with OMNY, and Stephen is right that they're interconnected.

Going headfirst into contactless before getting a farecard working well was the first mistake. That made implementing fare capping much harder. And instead of course correcting, they've just doubled down.