While ridership patterns once riders are on trains are always interesting and instructive, what passengers do before boarding and after alighting can be just as important. The following graphs show how Long Islanders get to the train for different parts of the system:
These figures are adapted from the LIRR’s 2012-2014 Origin and Destination survey, which was done as part of the MTA’s 5-year capital program and financed in part by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council. The survey asked respondents a wide variety of questions about their trip, including not only their origin and destination on the train, but also where they were coming form and going to, how they got to the train station, how they got to the “last mile” to their destination, demographic information, the purpose of their trip, and more. In limited cases here, the data that was ‘cleaned’ to standardize everything and reduce the number of text responses that closely matched other categories.
The results are fairly interesting…while the number of people driving alone and parking at the station is definitely a dominate share, only about 38% of survey respondents systemwide indicated that they drive alone and parked. The other 62% get there by other means, including getting dropped off, walking, connecting transit, or by other means. The number of respondents who drive to the train is higher in Suffolk County (45%) and lower in Brooklyn and Queens (22%). A large number of respondents, about one-fourth, are driven to the train station, but only get dropped off/picked up and don’t park. About 8% of respondents reported carpooling and parking, with the average carpool size being 2.4 people.
A disappointingly low 4.9% of respondents took connecting transportation (i.e. a bus) to the train. Only 2% of respondents who started their trip on LI took the bus to the train. Another 22% or so walked to the train, including 20% of all respondents who started their trips on Long Island.
The following table shows the proportion of each arrival mode for each part of Long Island:
The most who drive to the train do so in Huntington, while driving-and-parking is less common on the East End, where commuter traffic is almost non-existent. Long Beach riders are the most likely to walk to the train.
The following tables show which stations have the highest share of riders arriving by each arrival mode. The structure of the questions in the survey were confusing, which is why some of these results may seem funny. The phrasing of the questions was slanted considerably towards traditional LI->NYC travelers…the question for this part was phrased to the affect of “how do you arrive at the station for your westbound trip”. So reverse commuters could have been easily confused and put down the station combinations backwards or got the arrival vs. egress modes mixed up, so take the numbers with a small grain of salt:
The stations where the fewest people drive are, in descending order: Pinelawn, East New York, Nostrand Avenue, Greenport, Forest Hills, Kew Gardens, Flushing-Main Street, Montauk, Woodside, Riverhead, and Jamaica.
Respondents who indicated that they took the bus to the train were given the option to indicate which route they took. The most common routes among respondents were the Q13, n40, n23, n58, Q6, n25, Q44, n22, n35, and the n20. A full table including all routes is included in the “appendix tables” link attached separately in the original e-mail.
When you instead look at arrival mode at all stations by trip purpose (instead of by boarding station) the results are also interesting. When it comes to commuting to and from work, about half of respondents said they drove to the train station. For other trip purposes, like recreation, fewer people drove. I imagine this is an artifact of the way parking is set up at LIRR stations…in many places, if you’re travelling for recreation during the week, there’s no parking left by the time you get there, or what parking is there is restricted to permit holders, and you might not have a permit if you don’t travel frequently. Modes like carpooling are more common for discretionary travel, i.e. you’re travelling with a group.
The Excel file I used to generate these is over 30 MB, so it would be too large to attach or upload a link to, but if you’re interested in looking into the statistics more, you can let me know and I can get you the sheet one way or another. I tried to attach as many of the sheets and tables as I could in the “Appendix Tables” file linked separately in the e-mail.
