And if you guessed that, you would have guessed correctly, as yesterday was an exceptional day for the LIRR in terms of overcrowded and delayed trains. To complicate matters further, the LIRR's server that supports their Train Time service keeled over in the middle of the rush hour Friday, so we will have to wait for next week to get official confirmation of the numbers, but the hand-timed figures I got with my watch and timetable were not that pretty.
The Hamptons OTP Spreadsheet that is continually updated throughout the weekend has specific delayed train and consist information, and as you can see, there was only one train that arrived on-tiem the entire weekend. Train 2714 ran on July 2nd this year for the first time, and that train was the only train over the course of the getaway period to arrive at Montauk on-time.
Train 2708, which used to be my favorite Friday train, has been proving itself to be the bad apple thus far in the summer season, with only two on-time arrivals since Memorial Day weekend (tied with 2718, which both have the same 29% OTP so far this summer).
Senselessly, the LIRR does not publicly release ridership data for the Hamtpons trains, so I do not have any specific numbers to share with you, but I tried Thursday evening to get a ballpark estimate as to just how many riders took the LIRR yesterday. Using the consist information on the OTP Spreadsheet, plus some general mathematical multipliers based off of the relative load on each train, I would wager that total ridership to the Hamptons on Thursday afternoon's trains came pretty close to 12,000 riders.
12,000 riders is an impressive amount of people, and considering that the railroad only carried about 7,916 people to the Hamptons on the average July 3rd between 2005 and 2010. And if you could use July 3rd ridership as a benchmark for ridership for the entire summer, you would be able to roughly predict just how many riders the LIRR will carry to the Hamptons over the course of the whole summer. By my calculations, the LIRR is on track to carry about 276,688 passengers to the Hamptons this summer. That's a whole 9% more than last year.
Ridership to the Hamptons has been steadily increasing (as we saw last week), but the capacity the LIRR has to transport these people has been exactly what it has been for years. And as passenger loads rise, and the equipment ages, we should anticipate seeing more and more delays due to overcrowded trains and trains that have equipment problems. The railroad is in a tough position, as it will become increasingly difficult to transport the masses going forward.
On two occasions on Thursday night, the LIRR had to turn people who were looking to board trains to Montauk away in Jamaica because there was no more room for them on the train. Trains 2708 and 2720 both left a little under an entire carload's worth of people on the platform in Jamaica. To "accommodate" these folks, they were put on the next Babylon local scheduled to leave Jamaica (in this case, trains 120 and 180, respectively), and then bussed to the Hamptons from Babylon.
The railroad is going to have to come up with some sort of way to accommodate these people, because I'll bet you any amount of money that ridership to the Hamptons will be up another 10% or so next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. Making the overflow sit through all local stops to Babylon and then a enjoy luxurious motorcoach accommodations (i.e. school bus) is not really an effective way for the Long Island Rail Road to transport people to where they want to go. The LIRR's current plans for diesels doesn't involve doing anything with the troublesome fleet until 2023 at the earliest, and who knows what ridership to the Hamptons will be like by that point. They might have more people on those buses than they do on the actual trains...
At any rate, I'll leave you with two videos from Jim Ryan posted in the comments of the Fourth of July service post showing trains 2708 and the Cannonball arriving at Westhampton and disgorging their loads onto the platform.
As someone who's suffered through the crowds and delays first-handed every Friday for the last four years, things have definitely gotten worse since I moved to where I live now, and I don't really have much hope for future summers.
Thanks very much for posting these videos again, Patrick. Those were indeed some wild scenes to behold that day. Also, as you can see in Sunny Zheng's reply to me asking him about the passenger load on Thursday's Cannonball, Sunny states: "As an employee I have access to the result of the counters. It was between 2,500 and 2,600." Doing some quick math, and splitting the difference of Sunny's high and low figures, 2550 divided by 12 would give us an average of 212 per C3 car, which was probably proportionally higher in the rear 10 cars, since I understand there would be no standees in the first two Hamptons Reserve cars. As for Train 2708, it was my personal observation that 2708 with its 9 cars appeared to be just as crowded, if not more crowded, per car than the Cannonball if that's possible.
ReplyDeleteMetro north passengers bitch about crowded trains! They should try riding that train! Maybe Jimbo and his pal Dick, can tell you guys how to fix your over crowded problem.
ReplyDeleteIs it possible that the LIRR will just start selling enough tickets as they line can accommodated? Might be a bit tough to police who gets on the train but people will get the message. Seems they are overselling these trains as it is.
ReplyDeleteWell, yes you can. You have plenty of equipment to support Port Washington trains. On the other hand you don't have enough cars to support the diesel service you want to provide. Additionally worst case scenario is that there are no seats on a Port Washington train (rare) the entire trip is 47 minutes. Diesel rides are much , much longer.
ReplyDeleteI said "discriminate" in a legal sense. Whether it is 47 minutes or 3 hours is irrelevant. LIRR is an open access unreserved system, except for their for their Parlor / Hampton Reserve cars. Legally, (and poltically) it isn't acceptable.
ReplyDeleteThe LIRR does not have the luxury of picking and choosing who can ride and who cannot. As a state-funded, public agency, they have to treat all passengers equally, and they can only begin to turn away passengers once the maximum occupancy of the cars are exceeded (and the cars are constructed to such high standards that that maximum occupancy point is several times the seated load, to the point that you can have people crammed in there elbow to elbow and on top of one another's shoulders and you won't exceed the maximum occupancy point).
ReplyDeleteThe same thing was suggested back with the Belmont Stakes "fiasco", but the LIRR can't "reserve" seats on anything other than two cars of the Cannonball which gets away with it because it was grandfathered in and only because it still has 10 unreserved cars for everyone else.
Which is why the "Parlor Car Only" consists from Greenport (Monday mornings) and Montauk (Friday nights) went the way of the carrier pigeon in the early 1970's.
ReplyDeleteWhy not peak-price that and similar premium service trains? Like DOUBLE or TRIPLE the current price. The subsidies aren't enough?
ReplyDeleteThe only thing "premium" here is one train in either direction per week and then in only 2 of the coaches designated "Hamptons Reserve".
ReplyDeleteThe subsidies got nothing to do with it.
Should we also double the price of some overcrowded Ronkonkoma trains ?