This item appeared first in News and Notes: October 23, 2016
When the LIRR suspends service during the off-peak periods, they are usually good enough to arrange for substitute bus service to take riders to their destinations. While they don’t always get enough buses and they often take too long to get busses to the stations where people need them, having substitute bus service available does enable riders to get to work or home without being extraordinarily delayed.
However, during disruptions that happen at rush hour or affect lots of riders, the railroad usually won’t provide any alternate service for most, if not all, of the service disruption. After last week’s derailment, riders were left for over two hours before any kind of alternate service began operating. This has long been a major gripe I have with the railroad—during these issues, the railroad typically tells riders to just “use alternate branches”, but to consider that any sort of real alternative to proper alternative service is ridiculous and insulting.
Assuming that people can just pick up and use a different branch is wrong in several ways. First, not everyone drives and parks at their local station—many walk, bike, take the bus, or get dropped off—and the idea that everyone can just drive to a different station is neglectful. It’s even worse when that’s the alternate service plan in the evenings…for those that do have to drive, if their car is in the parking lot at Ronkonkoma, taking the train to Sayville doesn’t do them any good at all. In the first few hours after the derailment, the LIRR was telling riders on Twitter looking to get home from Hicksville to use Wantagh station instead. Wantagh is about a 2 hour, 30 minute walk from Hicksville, and at 10:30p on a night when it was raining, the LIRR must be the only one thinking that’s a real alternative.
What usually ends up happening in these situations is people use another branch and then they’re left to take a cab to their destination—and if you’re looking for a cab on LI during a LIRR service disruption you usually get robbed (like $50-$60 to go a few stations), and the LIRR doesn’t do anything to make things right afterwards.
And even if you have the ability to drive to a different branch, often times when you get there, you don’t have any way to park your car. Almost every single station west of the Sagtikos Parkway now has some sort of resident parking restriction for most or all of their parking spaces, and the number of stations with unrestricted parking has really diminished recently—Bay Shore, Seaford, Bellmore, Merrick, and Baldwin all used to have decent amounts of unrestricted parking, and now there is almost none at those stations. There are just six stations left in Nassau and western Suffolk that have any halfway-decent number of spaces all free and unrestricted: Copiague, Hewlett, Woodmere, Oyster Bay, Sea Cliff, and Roslyn (and Roslyn might be going to resident permits in part of the lot sometime soon). And nearly all of those lots get full or relatively close to full on a daily basis.
Driving to another station is fairly pointless if you’re not going to be able to park there—and those that take the LIRR’s advice but don’t check the parking regulations carefully first can come back to find a hefty parking ticket left for them. The only place where it’s really an option for people is in the Town of Oyster Bay—the one permit they issue can be used in any of the lots at Syosset, Hicksville, Bethpage, Locust Valley, Glen Head, and Massapequa, so you have some options on a couple different branches, but since most town lines are split down the middle of the Island, those options are not available elsewhere (the Town of Brookhaven also runs all the way north-south, but they don’t issue permits for parking in their lots).
According to the responsibility box on the back of the timetables, the LIRR isn’t required to provide any alternative transportation during disruptions at all, but any railroad that has some semblance of a customer focus has an obligation to get riders to where they said they would in a relatively timely manner—so they ought to be taking more proactive measures to make sure their riders are looked after during service disruptions. While instantaneously providing substitute bus service for everybody might not be possible every day, there are a number of things the LIRR could do to make getting to destinations easier for riders during disruptions:
Cross-honor fares with local bus services
The LIRR is not the only public transportation provider on Long Island, so when rail service grinds to a halt, people should still be able to get around. There are three large bus providers on Long Island—NICE in Nassau, HART in the Town of Huntington, and SCT in the rest of Suffolk (in addition to MTA Buses in Queens). In New Jersey, when there is a rail service disruption, NJT will frequently cross-honor rail tickets and passes on NJT and private carrier bus routes, PATH trains, and NYWaterway ferries. Cross-honoring gives riders the option to take advantage of alternate ways to get where they need to go.
The LIRR will cross-honor fares on the New York City Subway sometimes when service is completely suspended west of Jamaica, but has never done so with non-MTA local buses on Long Island. Yes, they are all separate systems, but that has never stopped NJT, PATH, and NYWaterway—all separate systems—from cross-honoring with each other. NYWaterway is even a public-private partnership, like NICE, so even that has been done successfully before. If the LIRR reciprocates and cross-honors NICE, HART, and SCT riders in-kind when there are issues with those systems, chances are the costs can come close to washing out, but even if it doesn’t, the LIRR can just suck it up and pay the $2.50 if is necessary to get their passengers to their destinations when their service is disrupted.
If the railroad had a working relationship with the bus operators, they could also work out agreements to have the bus operators keep drivers late or call-in more drivers to provide additional service to handle rail riders. That might work out being cheaper for the LIRR than cold-calling different bus operators and getting charged and arm and a leg for buses, which is also better for riders in the long-run.
There’s little reason why the LIRR and the bus operators can’t cross-honor tickets and passes with each other during service disruptions other than the different agencies just don’t want to figure out a way to cooperate with each other for the benefit of their riders. It’s inexcusable.
Work with municipalities to suspend parking restrictions during disruptions
For those that can manage to drive to other stations on different branches, it’s often an exercise in futility due to parking restrictions. While it’s true that local municipalities manage most parking at stations, especially west of the Sagtikos Parkway, it would do us commuters a lot of good if the LIRR made arrangements with the different cities, towns, and villages that manage parking to give the railroad the ability to suspend parking restrictions on their behalves on days where there are service disruptions. That way, someone who lives in Westbury can go and park at Wantagh and get to work without having to worry about getting a ticket for not having a permit.
While it’s not the perfect solution (since lots often fill even before non-residents are allowed in), the principle of reciprocity should work here too…while it’s an inconvenience for residents near that station to let non-residents in when there’s a service disruption, it’ll work out better for them someday down the road when service on their line gets knocked out. The people from Wantagh can also go park in Hicksville as the disruption clears up later in the rush hour.
Getting these kinds of arrangements in place would require the LIRR to have a relatively good relationship with the municipalities they serve, something that has often not been the case all that much lately. The railroad needs to work with the local municipalities more to make sure their customers are looked after.
Sign contracts with preferred bus providers for minimum call-in requirements
A big problem when the railroad does arrange for buses to transport people during service disruptions is the buses can sometimes take a long time to actually show up. In some respects, the railroad is at the mercy of the bus companies, but the railroad should strongly consider soliciting proposals from bus companies to become preferred bus providers—then the railroad could develop agreements with these bus companies to have minimum call-in requirements for different parts of the Island at different times of the day.
Then, if the bus providers can make a certain number of buses available within a specified amount of time, the railroad pays the bus operator more (like 25% more) than the going rate they would’ve paid had they just cold-called companies for buses. And if one of the preferred bus providers doesn’t meet the minimum call-in requirements, then they get paid less (like 25% less) than the going rate for the buses that are provided.
Contracts like these would let the bus operators hedge their bets on chances to earn more money off LIRR service disruption while allowing the railroad to get alternate service available for their riders faster.
Having preferred bus providers who stand in for train service on a semi-regular basis might also cut down on the number of occasions where substitute bus drivers get lost going from one station to another, something that happens with alarming frequency, especially during planned busing programs.
All together, these are three of several measures the LIRR could be taking to make things easier for riders when they’re not able to provide the service they said they would. Lots of these measures require the railroad to work more closely with others, which will be a tough psychological step for an organization that is very fond of doing things their way (and the way it’s always been done) and doesn’t have a great history of playing nicely with others. Hanging riders out to dry by providing no, or poor, alternate transportation during disruptions is indicative of a lack of customer focus, which, flatly, has become more and more obvious in recent years.
