The LIRR has announced that it will be providing slightly increased service after Islanders games (and before Islanders games on weekends too) this season. For all games, the LIRR will add a fourth post-game extra train to Ronkonkoma, in addition to the current local train to Farmingdale. For weekend games, the LIRR will add an additional round-trip from Ronkonkoma to Atlantic Terminal before the game and back after the game.
Service got off to a very rocky start for the Islanders’ first season at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn last year. A couple games into the season last year, I stopped by Atlantic Terminal after an Islanders game to see how the LIRR handled the crowds, and observed a number of pretty big issues. When I visited again towards the end of the season, some of the issues were improved on, but many were still unresolved.
While the LIRR started the season with relatively high ridership figures, the LIRR’s market share declined over the course of the season. The LIRR claimed in their announcement about the increases that “about 40% of Islanders fans” took the LIRR, but that appears to be not true. According to the LIRR’s ridership figures, for the games they took ridership counts for (which was only for a small number of games), the LIRR carried, on average, just 29.8% of fans attending the game. If you include the post-season games they counted, it was just 30.1%. A market share of 30% doesn’t quite equal “about 40%” unless you do some ‘creative rounding.’
A table showing the LIRR’s market share for each game they counted for is shown below. Ridership started out with about one-third of attendees arriving and departing by train, but slumped down considerably in November, at which point the LIRR stopped taking ridership counts for most games. Since the LIRR’s service didn’t necessarily get worse over the course of the season, the decline of the railroad’s market share is consistent with people giving the train a try, getting screwed, then swearing it off, and finding another way there next time—and from sentiments expressed by lots of riders on Twitter, that seems to be what happened.
| Date | vs. | % Arriving on LIRR | % Departing on LIRR |
| 10/9/2015 | Chicago | 29% | 27% |
| 10/12/2015 | Winnipeg | 35% | 28% |
| 10/15/2015 | Nashville | 39% | 33% |
| 10/17/2015 | San Jose | 33% | 34% |
| 10/29/2015 | Carolina | 27% | 32% |
| 11/3/2015 | New Jersey | 18% | 29% |
| 11/30/2015 | Colorado | 18% | 18% |
| 12/2/2015 | Rangers* | 25% | 30% |
| 12/27/2015 | Toronto | 33% | 31% |
| 1/14/2016 | Rangers* | 34% | 40% |
| 1/17/2016 | Vancouver | 30% | 29% |
| 4/2/2016 | Pittsburgh | 28% | 35% |
| 4/17/2016 | Florida+ | 39% | 45% |
| 4/20/2016 | Florida+ | 38% | 41% |
| 4/24/2016 | Florida+ | 35% | 37% |
| 5/3/2016 | Tampa Bay+ | 26% | 36% |
| 5/6/2016 | Tampa Bay+ | 43% | 41% |
* - Local home opponent; + - Post-season game
The additional train to Ronkonkoma fills a pretty glaring hole in the LIRR’s initial service plan, but whether that will be enough to encourage riders to give the LIRR another shot will have to be seen. There are still no direct trains to Huntington and Long Beach, and there can be gaps in service of an hour to those stations, and they are still running a pointless and wasteful second post-game train to Babylon (when I was there last spring, the first train to Babylon was so full there were literally people standing between the cars as it pulled out; the second train to Babylon had about 100 people on it—and when you think about it, if you were to ask people “do you want to get home an hour from now, or an hour and a half from now”, how many are not going to take the first train? The only way to mitigate the crowding on the Babylon train is to properly manage connections (i.e. don’t have the employees there lazily tell people to just take the first train that’s posted to Jamaica and change there) or to split the stops on the train in half (i.e. split them into Wantagh and Babylon trains)).
But the biggest problem remains the lack of direct westbound trains before games on weekdays. The LIRR does not currently operate any direct trains from the major branches to Brooklyn before games, and the service the railroad provides now has a big 34-minute gap in westbound service to Brooklyn right before the games start. And the trains that do run are made up of mostly skimpy six-car trains that can’t handle large crowds that come off some of the major branch trains (when I was there in the spring, the 6:05p train from Jamaica to ATL was so packed that more than a hundred people couldn’t fit on and had to wait for the next train). There’s no real excuse for not having a pre-game direct train from Babylon, especially since they ran a direct pre-game train for the Islanders pre-season exhibition game in 2014 as well as on New Year’s Eve in 2014 and 2015. The westbound track remains open during the entire reverse-peak period (the LIRR just runs a whole bunch of trains empty, without passengers), so there are no physical obstacles preventing direct reverse-peak service, just psychological ones.
If the LIRR is going to run four post-event trains and have four sets of equipment and four crews on the clock, it would make sense to run those trains to Ronkonkoma, Long Beach, Huntington, and Babylon. Bethpage and Farmingdale don’t need two post-event trains while Syosset/Cold Spring Harbor/Huntington get none, and there’s no point in running a second Babylon train if nobody is going to use it…they can send it to Long Beach and push connecting travelers towards that train. Coupled with the existing Hempstead and Far Rockaway departures, there would be direct service to every station in electric territory except the West Hempstead Branch.
It’s important that the LIRR keeps trying to make its Islanders game service more useful and more efficient. It was clear that the LIRR’s performance during the Islanders’ first season in Brooklyn wasn’t completely satisfactory, to the point where the new Islanders ownership is reportedly considering the idea of running motorcoach bus service between places in Nassau and Suffolk and the Barclays Center for Islanders fans. Without improvement, LIRR Islanders game ridership will likely go the way of the railroads Nets game service…when the Nets first moved to the Barclays Center, the railroad carried an average of 3,300 riders home from each game. That number has since declined by 33%, and last season, the LIRR cut its post-Nets game extra service by 50% on weekdays and 100% on weekends and nobody really noticed.
The Islanders’ move to Brooklyn presented a significant opportunity for the LIRR to attract new riders. Their performance in the Islanders’ first season wasn’t a complete failure, but by no means a resounding success. There are still lots of holes that need to be plugged and lots of issues that need to be addressed in order to make traveling to the Barclays Center on the LIRR a trip fans want to take, not one they have to take to see their team which used to be 10 minutes away on the Meadowbrook. There was a lot of bad blood surrounding the Islanders’ move from Uniondale to Brooklyn, but despite rumors and dreams of many fans that the Islanders can opt-out of their contract and move, they’ll likely be there for good, so the LIRR should be making the best of it. We’ll have to see how it goes.
