If you were to stand on West Columbia Street in Hempstead Village, you would see NICE’s Hempstead Transit Center on one side of the street and the LIRR’s Hempstead Station on the other. Though despite there being a specially made pedestrian crosswalk with a traffic light and everything, you would see few people actually walk between the two. That’s because Long Island’s transportation network is stratified into two pretty distinct tiers, and it’s due in no small part due to the LIRR’s highest-in-the-nation fares.
On one side of the street, you can catch the n6 or n6X bus (which runs every 4-10 minutes during rush hour), which is a 35-40 minute ride to 179 St in Jamaica (if the bus shows up and actually runs on-time). There you can get a free transfer to the F train, and a long 43 minutes later you can be in Midtown Manhattan. That trip takes about an hour and 45 minutes, but only costs you $2.75. On the other side of the street, you could get a Hempstead Branch train that can get you to midtown Manhattan in 50 minutes—less than half the time the bus takes—though trains only run every 20-30 minutes at peak or every 40-50 minutes during reverse-peak hours. But there’s one big catch—a one-way ticket costs $12.00—more than four times the cost of the bus fare.
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| A reverse-peak n20G bus leaving people behind because it was so crowded. Meanwhile reverse-peak Port Wash trains that run parallel to this are nearly, because the fare is more than three times. (Photo: @MartketUrbanism) |
If you look at Brentwood, 19% of those that have jobs there make less than $1,250 per month…with the fare hike, a monthly would immediately gobble up more than 31% of your pay, before taxes, rent, food, etc. If you had to get into the city to start work at 9a and you can’t afford the train, you would have to leave at 10:15p the night before and spend the night at the Babylon LIRR station because the buses don’t run early enough. This basically completely closes off these people from the chance at better-paying jobs in the city job market.
This is one big reason why the ‘fairer fares’ campaign for discounted subway and bus fares for low-income residents has rung a little hollow with me. If someone in Queens can’t afford a $2.75 MetroCard fare, in what solar system do those people think someone living in Brentwood can afford a $19 one-way ticket on the LIRR?
NICE and SCT have basically devolved into an entirely duplicate transportation system for poor people… As budgets run tight and ridership decreases, the bus operators are cutting the few routes that actually add some net transportation value (like the north-south routes), leaving just the busiest routes that roughly parallel rail corridors.
This stratification also has some pretty major side-effects: because NICE and SCT have to be a sort-of crutch for those who can’t afford to pay through the nose for the train, their bus routes and schedules are incredibly inefficient. And that causes ridership to decline further, necessitating more cuts, which leads to a greater decline in ridership, triggering a downward spiral. In just a couple of days, on April 9, NICE will eliminate service completely on 10 bus routes and drastically cut service on nine more.
Long Island’s busses are completely useless for most Long Islanders. I have lived on LI for all my life, and in Suffolk for the last 6 years, and I have never set foot on a SCT bus, and if I have ever ridden a NICE/MTA Long Island Bus in my lifetime, it was before I learned to drive. The bus operators have to work under tremendous financial constraints, as County Executives can’t justify raising taxes for a service that 96% of residents never use.
The stratification also impacts parking…lots are filled to the brim with cars because unless you live across the street from a station, there’s really no other way to get there. You can’t take a dedicated feeder bus because NICE and SCT have to use all the buses and drivers to run duplicative service for those that can’t afford train fares. So everybody drives and parks…
So long as things stay the way they are, bus ridership will only decline further, necessitating more and more cuts, until the point where there’s next to nothing left. The only sustainable fix for this problem is to get local municipalities to contribute to bus systems in lieu of parking improvements, but you can’t sell that without a massive overhaul of NICE and SCT’s route structures to make the buses actually useful to people, and you can’t do that while the bus systems have to be that second class of service for people who can’t afford LIRR fares.
This is why getting LIRR fares under control is so important. While the constant increases are an inconvenience for people who are fortunate enough to make a good living, they are the end of the world to those who are not. High LIRR fares lock NICE and SCT into running almost entirely duplicative services for those that can’t afford the train, wasting money and short-changing everyone else who has to drive or park someplace on LI.
I’m not saying that the LIRR should cost just $2.75 for every trip, but they should be more in line with the average fare per mile for US commuter railroads (which is about $0.28 per mile) rather than being the highest of the bunch (LIRR costs on average $0.48 per mile). I think bringing fares down to express bus fare levels would be the most reasonable…that would bring one-way fares down to $0.27 per mile, which is right at the average for US commuter railroad systems. It should be easily attainable. This is what express bus level fares would look like:
Between zone 1 and: |
One-way |
Half-fare |
Ten-trip |
Monthly w/out MC |
Monthly with MC |
Weekly w/out MC |
Weekly with MC |
Zone 1 |
$5.25 |
$2.75 |
$52.50 |
$131.00 |
$197.00 |
$35.00 |
$52.50 |
Zone 3 |
$6.25 |
$3.25 |
$62.50 |
$156.00 |
$234.00 |
$41.50 |
$62.25 |
Zone 4 |
$7.25 |
$3.75 |
$72.50 |
$175.00 |
$263.00 |
$46.75 |
$70.00 |
Zone 7 |
$8.25 |
$4.25 |
$82.50 |
$200.00 |
$300.00 |
$53.25 |
$79.75 |
Zone 9 |
$9.50 |
$4.75 |
$95.00 |
$230.00 |
$345.00 |
$61.25 |
$91.75 |
Zone 10 |
$11.25 |
$5.75 |
$112.50 |
$243.00 |
$364.00 |
$64.50 |
$96.75 |
Zone 12 |
$13.50 |
$6.75 |
$135.00 |
$256.00 |
$384.00 |
$68.25 |
$102.25 |
Zone 14 |
$17.50 |
$8.75 |
$175.00 |
$332.00 |
$498.00 |
$88.25 |
$132.50 |
I think these are much more reasonable, both to regular commuters and occasional travelers, and are much more in line with what you see in other cities around the country—and these fares should be easily attainable if the LIRR took steps to work more efficiently, saving costs by eliminating conductors and going to a Proof-of-Payment system widely used in Europe, among other things.
Once fares are at these levels then I would say it would be fair to start waning NICE and SCT off their roles as duplicative transportation crutches, and restructuring their routes to better complement the LIRR, making transportation for everyone on Long Island faster, easier, and more affordable.
