MTA moving to "Essential Service Plan"

The MTA has announced plans to reduce service across all of its operating agencies this week as a result of cratering ridership with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.  Ridership has dropped by 90% or more across MTA properties, resulting in a dramatic reduction in the amount of revenue collected, threatening the MTA's already shaky financial position.  Across the MTA network, the agency will generally be moving towards a weekend schedule with some extra service by Friday.

For the LIRR, trains will be running primarily on a weekend schedule with a very small handful of extra trains from Friday, March 27.  The new timetables are posted on the All Timetables page on the MTA website. At quick glance, the "essential service plan" has just six trains beyond the normal weekend schedule: one early morning westbound train from Babylon and one from Ronkonkoma, and a pair of dual mode round-trips from Oyster Bay and Port Jefferson during rush hours filling large gaps in service on the diesel lines.  This is significantly fewer extra trains than what we saw in previous years on Martin Luther King, Jr. holidays ("Appendix M") before the railroad began running full weekday service on that holiday in 2019.

The West End Concourse during rush hour last week
The WEC will also be closed overnight from now on.
(Photo: @cannolifactory/Twitter)

The move to reduce service is a reasonable one given the extraordinary drop-offs in ridership seen already.  Hopefully the LIRR will take the opportunity to modify crew assignments to save on operating costs, which will shrink the hole in the railroad's operating budget that will have to get filled back in at some point down the line.  The weekend schedule requires about 90 fewer passenger train crews and, in this case, there should be zero collectors, which reduces the number of train and engine service personnel required to run daily service by about 420.  At the very least, hopefully the railroad is modifying crew assignments to minimize overtime to extinction for the duration of this event (e.g. by splitting up one assignment that involves OT into two shifts 8 hours or less, instead of keeping one crew on OT as normal and having the second report to stand around and do nothing because they don't have any trains to run...).  The reduction in service should also allow the LIRR to limit the amount of vehicles in service on a daily basis, which reduces the number of cars that have to be cleaned every 72 hours, reducing the demand on cleaning resources (ideally, at least the entire M-3 fleet would be sidelined for the duration of this situation, as those roving boxes of grime are probably next-to-impossible to actually get clean!)

Though as with any occasion when LIRR runs a weekend schedule on a business day (because of a snowstorm, etc.), the typical weekend schedule has a handful of bad gaps in service that could cause undesirable crowding, likely even in these times of dramatically lower ridership.  The most significant hole is in service before 7:00a.  7:00a start times are very common in construction, and a fair number of hospitals often have shifts that start at 7:00a.  During these times, when construction has remained more or less in full swing and the healthcare industry is very much going on all cylinders, having service and adequate seating capacity in the 5:30a-7:00a timeframe is much more important than the typical 7:30a-9:00a commuting peak for bankers and typical office workers, most of which are working from home.  The LIRR's weekend schedules do not do a good job of serving these early morning hours, at all, and while the railroad added a 5:00a train from Ronkonkoma and a 5:00a train from Babylon to help that a little, there are still several branches where the 'first train' of the day doesn't arrive until 7:00a or much later.

@LIRR On 3/27 you’ve eliminated the 4:18am Port Jeff to Penn train. Construction workers who are deemed essential rely on this train for their 7am start time. Now we have to drive to the Ronkonkoma line making that train crowded and no more social distancing. Reconsider.

— Seth G (@SethG67) March 26, 2020

The peak with construction workers again becomes important going eastbound from 2:30p-4:00p, or a little earlier. At these times, the LIRR is running no extra trains, and in the weekend schedule there are even cases where there are hour gaps in service to local stations on the South Shore.

Second, neither the typical weekend schedules nor the "essential service plan" include service to Hunterspoint Avenue or Long Island City—people who work on the East Side must not be essential.  In this case, as is the case on every weekend, it would be very easy for LIRR to extend some existing trains to HPA/LIC for these occasions, like Oyster Bay trains (which currently sit around at Jamaica doing nothing for almost two hours every turn) or West Hempstead trains (which sit idle for 45 minutes out of every hour).  Extending these trains would provide at least some service to HPA/LIC and would result in zero additional cost or crew/equipment resources.

The weekend/holiday schedule also provides only bare bones half-hourly service to and from Brooklyn, with very long connections at Jamaica for some branches.

Similarly, the LIRR's typical weekend and "essential service plan" is incompatible with commuting needs from the East End.  The LIRR's weekend schedules are designed to get people from New York City out to the East End for day trips, instead of the more traditional flow in the opposite direction.  On the Montauk Branch, this means that the first westbound train that comes from east of Speonk doesn't arrive western terminals until after 10:00a, after the morning rush hour is over.  Going back home, riders would have to leave the city at 11:45a or 9:12p, both well outside of the typical rush hour.  East of Ronkonkoma, commuting west by train is pretty much impossible.  With the LIRR operating the off-season weekend schedule (with only two round-trips east of Ronkonkoma), with the first westbound train from Greenport not arriving western terminals until almost 3:00p...and the last eastbound train leaves New York at 1:12p, making taking the train to work completely impossible (you could only get as far as Farmingdale, where you could work for a whole 5 minutes before having to turn around and go back).  While the number of passengers commuting from the East End all the way to the city is near zero, especially during the current situation, but the option should still be preserved, especially for intra-Island riders (the South Fork Commuter Connection is not running at all, and the weekend schedule has no real equivalent, marooning those riders).

Both the issues with the lack of HPA/LIC service and unworkable commuter service on the East End would be very easy to solve...for HPA/LIC, they could just extend existing trains or run a shuttle between Jamaica and Hunterspoint Avenue to fill the gap; for the East End, we don't need three eastbound trains to Montauk before lunchtime when it's not quite beach weather, one or two of those round-trips could be swapped for a better-timed rush hour train to fill large gaps in service east of Patchogue.  Hopefully these very simple and heads-up changes would not be too far outside the box for the Manhattan and Ronkonkoma Railroad, especially given that MTA Chief Operating Officer Mario Péloquin said in a press conference on Tuesday that "trains in the peak hour will continue to run" (but that's only partially true).

During this time, when the railroad is running weekend service, off-peak fares and half-fares will be honored around-the-clock, though the LIRR says they will not accept CityTicket for travel on weekday trains.

Other MTA services will see similar reductions, with Metro-North seeing the largest reductions (also starting on Friday).  West of Hudson service has been on a modified weekend schedule since late last week.  More details on those service changes are available on the MTA website.

Aside from a couple of gaps mentioned above, which will hopefully be promptly realized and addressed, moving to this weekend schedule will allow for the MTA to reduce the amount of resources required to operate service while still providing ample capacity for those who need to use the service to get to and from where they need to be.