Merging the LIRR and Metro-North?

As during every period of MTA financial stress, such as the one we are in now, various ideas surface for MTA organizational and governance reform in an attempt to save money on overhead costs in lieu of service cuts or further fare hikes.  Whether this involves the consolidation/reorganization of purely administrative functions (like the MTA Business Center in 2008) or other organizational reform within the operating agencies themselves, there's usually no shortage of ideas to slim down the MTA bureaucracy.  Unfortunately, many of these ideas have either never made it off the drawing board, or never delivered much in terms of cost savings if they did.

One idea that frequently pops up is combining the MTA's two railroads, the LIRR and Metro-North.  These two MTA agencies, despite doing similar work, work almost completely separate from one another.  They each have their own leadership and organizational structures, their own presidents and vice presidents and administrative staff, their own rules and procedures, their own means and methods.  They certainly have different levels of productivity and efficiency.  Aside from the letters "MTA" in front of their names, there's not a whole lot in common between the two.

Comparison of LIRR and Metro-North labor productivity (revenue car hours/total operating employee hours)
from 2018 comparison of the two systems by the Citizens Budget Commission

That is not to say there is nothing in common between the agencies...they do share some common ticketing facilities (though there is no through ticketing between the two systems, and the underlying fare rules are different), they partnered on joint MU railcar procurements with the M-1, M-3, and the M-7 (the jury is still out on the M-9A), though like the railroads, the cars are similar, but different...with different seating arrangements, signalling systems, and configurations.  The two railroads are both regulated by the same federal regulations under the Federal Railroad Administration, but have different operating rules, signalling systems, and other policies.  Still, though, they have more differences than commonalities.

Many of these differences are rooted in the two railroad's divergent histories as children of the northeast's two major rival railroads.  While the LIRR was formed by the merging of a number of independent systems during the late 1800's, its largest period of expansion and improvement came while under the ownership of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which stewarded the railroad through the first half of the last century.  At the same time, the Hudson Valley commuter lines were being built out and run by the PRR's rival, the New York Central Railroad.  The competition between the two railroads, both distinct, private entities, was cutthroat.  The agencies expanded and developed signal, electrification, and other systems in the way that was most efficient and economical for them, and they could not quite copy what the other was doing.

The LIRR was brought under state ownership in 1965 after the Pennsylvania Railroad was looking to cut its most costly subsidiary.  The PRR and NYCRR's dueling ended in 1968 when the two systems merged to form Penn Central, keeping the Hudson and Harlem lines in business for a little while longer (the West of Hudson Lines were children in a the similar Erie Lackawanna merger a few years earlier).  The New Haven Line (previously owned by the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad) was merged into Penn Central after going into bankruptcy in 1969.  The MTA subsidized the Penn Central commuter lines from 1970, with the agency taking ownership of the New Haven Line jointly with the Connecticut DOT in 1971.  The MTA gained ownership of the Hudson and Harlem Lines in 1972, though they did not have full operational control for some time.  After Penn Central went bankrupt for good, its lines were taken over by Conrail, which lasted for a few years until the MTA took over full control of the Hudson Valley commuter lines in 1983.

Prior unification proposals

Since 1983, the former components of the Pennsylvania, New York Central, New York, New Haven and Hartford, and the Erie Railroads had all been brought under public ownership underneath the MTA, but while the former NYCRR, NYNH&HR, and to a lesser extent the Erie lines have all been more or less combined underneath the Metro-North flag, there have been few attempts at unification between the LIRR and Metro-North.

That is not to say that nobody has tried, or that the idea has never been taken seriously by the MTA.  The agency has made three attempts at unifying the two sister systems, in 1983, 1995, and 2002.  The 1995 plot would have involved renaming the LIRR to "Metro-East" and merging the two systems, but that ended up being thwarted by then-LIRR president Charles Hoppe during a tense MTA Board meeting.  The last serious attempt to unify the two railroads came in 2002-2003, when the MTA proposed merging the two systems into one "MTA Rail" system.  The effort was part of a larger reorganization effort to reform the MTA into five separate companies with a singular transportation mission (rail, subways, buses, bridges and tunnels, and capital construction).

True to MTA form, the plan was devised without the consultation or input of local officials and elected representatives, which ruffled many feathers, particularly those of members of the state legislature, which would have had to approve any formal merger or reorganization.  Even after coming out with their reorganization plan, the MTA did not disclose many substantive details, leaving many to wonder how such a unification would play out, and whether the unification would hurt riders of one system more than the other.  By the time the draft legislation made it to the legislature, the plan was pretty much DOA.  There were no sponsors, and, as far as I could tell, the bill never made it to the floor in either chamber.  The MTA shortly abandoned the plan, settling instead for "several minor proposals" to align some of the policies between the two systems.  You can read some articles from that time in this folder.

How much was the unification expected to save?  Just $30 million.

Pros and cons of unification

There are definitely a number of benefits to consolidation, chief among them the reduction of overhead costs.  Support employees--those not directly required to the operation of any one particular train--represents one of the single largest expenditures for both railroads.  The LIRR spent $1.3 billion on support employees in 2017 while Metro-North spent just over $1.0 billion, according to public payroll records with a fixed multiplier for the railroad's cost for healthcare, pensions, and other fringe benefit expenses.  Support employees represent 49% of where our LIRR fare dollars go, consuming an average of $14.01 per trip.

With more than 13,000 support employees between the two systems, not counting shared MTA overhead costs/employees, there has to be at least some fat to trim in administration, maintenance, etc.  There are particular opportunities for savings with those doing specialized tasks, since they could perform those for both railroads.

 (Photo: @Sophieaka/Instagram)

A common leadership structure can also mean that successful practices can be quickly adopted across all parts of the combined system, and lessons learned/corrective actions could be implemented faster, to prevent the same mistakes from being made multiple times.  For example, after the fatal Metro-North derailment near Spuyten Duvyil was attributed to the engineperson losing focus approaching the curve due to having diagnosed sleep apnea, it should not have taken a similar incident happening on the LIRR for sleep apnea testing to be expanded to that system (such testing was implemented only after it came to light that the engineperson at the controls during the January 2017 Atlantic Terminal derailment, that injured more than 100, was also found to have undiagnosed sleep apnea).

We could also benefit from some common strategic planning.  To say that the LIRR and Metro-North don't often think on the same page would be an understatement.  Many new initiatives or ideas start on one railroad and then take years to expand to the other, if they do at all.  A recent example was raised just last week...the LIRR has recently launched a new countdown page with GPS train tacking, available at mylirr.org.  But the new application was developed by the LIRR in a bunker, without Metro-North, so Metro-North riders won't be able to reap similar benefits for quite some time.

On larger scales they don't coordinate well either.  Capital needs and expansion opportunities are not well coordinated between the systems.  We've all heard the tales of the LIRR and Metro-North turf wars spurring the decision to put the LIRR terminal for East Side Access in a deep cavern instead of the two railroads sharing some of the existing tracks on the lower level of NY-Grand Central.  While I don't think the lower level alternative was as sure a success as some people think it would have been, as there are other challenges involved, it should have been honestly studied, and the "turf" disputes likely prevented an arm's length consideration of all alternatives.

At any rate, while the East Side Access fiasco was certainly not the wisest use of $12 billion and counting of the public's money, it's a pretty poor example of why we should unify the two railroads going forward.  East Side Access was a mistake, and it's clearly a lesson that's been learned.  While the twits in Penn Station Access have not yet been fully straightened out, nobody's considering digging a whole new cavern for Metro-North underneath NY-Penn Station.

A merge could mean the focus could favor one system over the other at any given time.  This was one of the main concerns the last time this was seriously discussed.  Around the time of the 2002-2003 merger proposal, for example, Metro-North was the shining star and performance on the LIRR was, comparatively, not so hot (though the 94.7% OTP experienced during that time sounds like a dream, compared to how things have been going in recent years).  There was concern among Hudson Valley commuters that a combined railroad would mean more attention and resources focused on Long Island's problems, and that they would get the short end of the stick in any major investments to improve reliability.  That is not to say that the bean counting is entirely a good thing, though.  The two regions can have different needs at different times, and wasting money on fluff/filler projects or shelving otherwise important projects so all the children can have the same allowance is not the best way to use the public's money.

To merge or not to merge?

While I think there are definitely more pros than cons when it comes to a merger, there remains the question of whether such a merger would be worth the energy that would be required to pull it off.  While the two railroads are, in theory, part of the same agency and should be similar enough, the two still have different organizational structures, different collective bargaining units and agreements, different rules and procedures, etc., and it would take quite a lot of work to untangle all the layers of bureaucracy and put the pieces back together in a cohesive, logical manner.  Such challenges have presented themselves in prior overhead mergers, and instead of breaking down the component pieces and truly consolidating, the end result typically just involves not much more than colocating people and adding another layer of management/bureaucracy.  It would be much easier to mess up a LIRR/Metro-North merger than it would be to get it right.

At the end of the day, the question that needs to be asked with any MTA action is: what value would this deliver to the taxpayers?  In terms of impact to just day-to-day commuters, a LIRR/Metro-North merger would probably have very little noticeable benefit.  Very few people commute or travel on both systems on any regular basis.  In the LIRR's 2012-2014 Origin and Destination survey, just 0.05% of respondents indicated their trip involved connecting to Metro-North for onward travel.  That's just 136 dual commuters if you scale the results up to the entire weekday ridership base.  Not many people commute across the CBD, and even projects like East Side Access will likely do little to spur any substantive growth between the two systems.

When it comes to overhead personnel and related costs, at railroads the size of the LIRR and Metro-North, in theory, there should be no great excesses at either system.  With economies of scale, even fairly specialized roles should have enough to keep themselves busy on one system or the other.  Now we know that's not the case, and that overstaffing is an issue at pretty much every level of both organizations, but a half-heated unification attempt would do little to address that.


Many of the purported benefits of unification are also not really dependent on unification.  Conveniences like through/joint ticketing do not require entities to be one system.  Simple accounting measures would be all that's needed to sell tickets on one system and honor them on the other.  Metro-North does this already with NJTransit and the Connecticut Department of Transportation.  Metro-North sells tickets on ConnDOT's behalf for service to/from and within Connecticut, NJTransit sells tickets on Metro-North's behalf for West of Hudson services, and the money makes its way to its appropriate home one way or another.  Tariff policies could and should be brought into line with one another, standardizing zones and zone fares, validity periods and other policies standardized without unification.  The average per-mile fare on the LIRR and Metro-North are already practically the same, with LIRR 3.3 cents more expensive per mile.  With the railroads' highly inefficient manual fare collection system, it should make no difference whether the ticket is printed on LIRR stock or Metro-North stock (which are the same!), or NJTransit stock.  The MTA's New Fare Payment System should eliminate any excuse for not being able to unify ticketing across discrete agencies.  It is possible, and it's demonstrated everyday in cities elsewhere in the world, like in London.

When it comes to improvements and innovation, all railroads should have their finger on the pulse of what is going on elsewhere in the industry.  When safety risks present themselves on other railroads, measures should be put in place immediately on every other system to mitigate a similar impact.  When new ideas or means and methods are developed to improve service, increase reliability, or better serve passengers, they should be identified and implemented promptly.  The LIRR should not just be learning from improvements at Metro-North, but also NJTransit, Caltrain, the Music City Star, the RER in Paris, or JR East in Japan...  The pervasive notion of uniqueness that can be found in every corner of the US railroading industry is a huge problem, addressing that requires a major culture change that has yet to happen in any shape or form at either system...a half-hearted unification attempt probably wouldn't address that problem either.

Harmonization of strategic planning across the agencies should already be managed by MTA Headquarters.  If not to manage needs and coordinate resources for all of the subordinate agencies, what is it there for?  It's not like the LIRR and Metro-North are in cutthroat competition with each other like the PRR and NYCRR were...they both have the letters "MTA" prefixed to their name.  The MTA's failure to effectively manage this process over the last several decades inspires little confidence that a new, intermediate layer of bureaucracy would be any better.


For the day-to-day commuter, coordination between the LIRR and Metro-North is pretty unimportant, as mentioned previously.  While only 0.05% of LIRR riders connect to Metro-North for onward travel, but many times that amount could have the opportunity to use connecting transit services (like NICE or SCT bus services on Long Island) if a tiny bit of effort was put into coordination between the two agencies.  Right now the LIRR and NICE/SCT might as well be operating in completely different universes.  The lack of connectivity between the two (and similar cases with BeeLine bus and Metro-North in Westchester), is largely due to the two-tiered transit system high rail fares have caused to come into existence over the last several decades, but the two railroads (and LIRR in particular) put next to no effort into coordination with external connecting services.  I consider joint ticketing between the LIRR and Metro-North far less important than joint ticketing between SCT and the LIRR.  Colocation and adding another layer of bureaucracy--typical of other MTA mergers--would do little to improve accountability and responsiveness, or coordination with external parities.  If anything, it would probably just obfuscate things further then they are already, and cause the railroads to become even more insular than they are today.

A perfectly-executed merger between LIRR and Metro-North could have substantial benefits, but I contend there is little to no chance of that happening successfully.  A half-hearted lumping together of the two systems would probably only succeed in making things worse for most people.  It's because of that I don't think a merger of LIRR and Metro-North worthwhile.

It may be time to accept the idea that the current MTA structure is broken beyond repair and consider a dissolution of the agency (for example, the local control/regional transportation council structure described here), rebuilding the transportation network with a more local focus, and providing a clean slate on which improvements could be built.