Improving station access, and all the different ways to cross the tracks

Railroads, like highways, can often be great dividers, they can pose barriers that can bisect communities and make getting from point A to point B frustratingly difficult.  While we hear a lot about highway grade crossings on Long Island—as we have so many of them—providing safe ways for pedestrians to cross the tracks is also very important, and these important facilities are often overlooked.  While it may not be a big deal for someone in a car to drive a half-mile down the road to cross the tracks and double back, for someone on foot, this is a much bigger deal.

Adequate pedestrian crossing facilities are especially important at stations, where pedestrian volume is the highest.  Given that many stations are double-tracked with side platforms, needing to cross tracks is a daily need for most people, as they need to cross from the side where they live or the side where they parked their car either in the morning or the afternoon.

This is very similar to the effort to reopen the many closed subway entrances on NYCT—and, in many regards, it's even more important on the LIRR, as our stations can be more than twice as long (an 8-car train of R160's is only 418 feet long, vs. a 12-car LIRR train that can be well over 1,000 feet long).  Not having sufficient access on either side or in the middle of stations can mean riders have to walk up to 2,000 feet or more out of their way on a daily basis, which is a big inconvenience and adds a lot to door-to-door travel times (which can make it more worthwhile to drive instead of using mass transit).

The west end of Kings Park station has no access
to go between the platforms (Photo: The LIRR Today)

At LIRR stations today, station access is very inconsistent.  Some have ways to enter/exit at both ends of the station, some have overpasses or underpasses in the center of the station, but many are only accessible from one location.  52 out of the LIRR's 126 stations have only a single access point (or set of access points grouped close together).  And the killer is, while reopening or building new subway entrances can require a lot of heavy construction, improving access at many of LIRR's open-air stations would require only a simple set of stairs, a few feet of ramp, and at most some sidewalk extensions.  The picture above was taken at the west end of Kings Park station—despite that grade crossing (and the houses to either side of it) being within spitting distance of the end of these 12-car platforms, there is no way to get there without trespassing on the tracks and walking on the ballast.  Instead, riders are forced to detour to the overpass at the center of the platform, then double back out through the parking lots and surrounding local streets until (roughly 2,000 feet of walking later) they get back to roughly where they started.  

Partial station access and longer walking times not only extend the door-to-door travel times, but it also dramatically reduces the amount of people who live within "walking distance" of a station—in this Kings Park example, the number of places within walking distance (generally 0.25 to 0.50 miles) is cut down by about a third.  Partial station access also has consequences for train loading and crowding.  LIRR trains generally load heaviest on the east end (e.g. the front cars leaving New York and Jamaica, the rear cars arriving).  This is generally aggravated at NY-Penn Station by the fact that most employment and attractions are located east of 7th Avenue, meaning most people are entering/exiting from the east end of the station.  But if you look at all of the other stations on the system, partial station access at the outlying stops certainly isn't helping.  Almost half of the LIRR's 126 stations do not have any access across the tracks at the west end of the station:

So while the railroad often encourages people to "walk back for seats" at NY-Penn Station and Jamaica, many don't bother because if their destination station doesn't have access points at the west side of the tracks would just have to trudge all the way back to the east side to get to their street, car, bus, etc.  

Improving station access to minimize pedestrian walking distances where possible would be an easy and relatively cheap way to deliver big cuts to door-to-door travel times.  With most people walking at a pace of 3 to 4 mi/hr, eliminating the need to walk the length of a 12-car platform at the beginning and/or end of the trip, adding an overpass or a set of stairs/ramps could save riders as much as 10 minutes per day (and what you consider what the MTA is spending to save—realistically—10 minutes or less per day with East Side Access, this is chump change!)

Below is probably more than you would ever want to know about all the different ways to cross railroad tracks, and some strategies for improving and standardizing station access across the system:

Grade crossings

The Locust Avenue crossing in Glen Head, with
little room left for pedestrians (Photo: The LIRR Today)

The simplest way to allow passengers to cross the tracks is at a grade crossing.  At the majority of stations, crossing the tracks using the shoulder of a nearby highway grade crossing is the only path between the tracks.  While this works fairly well in most situations, it does require pedestrians to mix with car traffic, and pedestrians usually have to squeeze single-file along the shoulder.  In a number of cases, this has been made worse by the installation of the grade crossing delineators—while these have helped deliver a big reduction in the number of cars turning onto the tracks, there are an unfortunate number of cases where the delineators have obstructed or completely taken up space for pedestrians, like the example above in Glen Head (this is the crossing immediately west of Glen Head station, so is used by a lot of pedestrians).

Other stations will have more space for pedestrians to cross (especially if there are defined sidewalks on both sides), but with few exceptions pedestrians are crossing only in the shoulder of the road, and there is little separation between cars and pedestrians.

Safety devices at grade crossings on Long Island vary a little from crossing to crossing (see this published in 2015 for more background), but all highway crossings on active LIRR passenger lines have at a minimum flashing lights and gates for the approaching car lanes.  Safety devices for the pedestrian paths vary a lot more...generally, if there is a defined sidewalk on both sides of the crossing, there will be an additional arm that comes down to protect the pedestrian path, but this is not a rule and there are plenty cases where pedestrian paths are not protected, or are only protected on one side with the direction of travel.  In the photo above of the Locust Avenue crossing just west of Glen Head station (which means it will have high pedestrian volume), you can see that the opposite side of the crossing has no gate protection for what's left of the pedestrian path.

A protected pedestrian crossing at Westwood station
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

An unprotected pedestrian crossing in Montauk Yard
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

There are only a handful of cases where there are dedicated pedestrian crossings, which are generally safer as they do not require pedestrians to mix with car traffic.  There are currently 7 pedestrian-only grade crossings on Long Island:

• Westwood station
• Malverne station
• Stony Brook station
• Mineola station
• Oyster Bay station/yard
• Montauk Yard
• Greenport Yard

The first four crossings listed above are protected crossings, meaning they have flashing lights, bells, and gates that activate when a train approaches the station (the first photo above shows the pedestrian crossing at Westwood station).  The last three crossings are in yards and do not have any protection.  The Montauk and Greenport examples are very low-risk, as trains rarely need to traverse them, and in Greenport the track ends less than 100 feet from the crossing.  At Oyster Bay, the pedestrian crossing does see a lot of train movements as it lies between the station and the yard, but they are generally slow speed (other than embellishing the crossbuck with LED's, this crossing has no protection).

While the MTA hasn't said explicitly that they are eliminating the pedestrian crossing just east of Mineola station, that is likely to be eliminated along with all of the others in this corridor as they are building a handful of new pedestrian overpasses elsewhere in the area.

The now-closed pedestrian crossing in Islip
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

The railroad has historically perceived these pedestrian crossings as unsafe.  In 2016 the LIRR closed a pedestrian crossing on the railroad at Islip station that it characterized as "dangerous", blocking off access here and requiring pedestrians to walk further down to the next highway crossing and double back.  That crossing had flashing lights and bells, but no gates.  At the time, the railroad's Deputy Chief Safety Officer Tim Doddo said the railroad received “almost daily reports from our engineers” of close calls at the crossing, though he admitted the railroad was aware of only one pedestrian accident at the crossing in the preceding 35 years.

Using grade crossings as the means for passengers to cross the tracks has a number of advantages.  First and foremost, it's very cheap...usually the only cost is a strip of pavement for the pathway across the tracks and the warning devices (and, as we can see all over Long Island, sometimes LIRR spares even that expense).  It can often more convenient for riders as well, since they just have to walk across the tracks...there are no steps to climb, and they're easy to cross with bikes, strollers, luggage, etc..  It is also fully accessible for people who need step-free access across the tracks, and they are not dependent on having two functioning elevators to get to the other side.  A downside is they can only be located at the extreme ends of the station platform, which is less helpful if you are boarding or alighting from the middle of the train.

On many newly-built rail systems in North America, pedestrian grade crossings are the standard issue at all stations except the busiest ones that warrant a dedicated overpass or cases where there are special elevation circumstances (e.g. the station is elevated, below-grade, or on a hill where stairs/elevators would've been required anyways).  This is especially prevalent in the South and out West where trains board at low-level platforms and there is an overall higher level of comfort with pedestrians mingling about close to the tracks.  At some stations, like Broadway station on Caltrain, they nearly dispense with the formalities altogether and you just walk across the active tracks to get to the island platform.

Pedestrian grade crossings definitely bring with them a fair bit of inherent risk.  Just like highway crossings and cars, any time you have something crossing in the same space as potentially fast-moving trains, there is risk of collision, injury, or death.  While it would be nice to fully eliminate the hundreds of remaining grade crossings on LI, the plain fact of the matter is that it's not something within the realm of possibility at this point in time, for a number of reasons.  Therefore, it's important to effectively manage grade crossing risk and figure out where grade crossings can be provisioned safely and where they need to be prioritized for elimination (instead of adopting a blanket and arbitrary no new grade crossings policy).

The pedestrian grade crossing at Stony Brook
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

One way to help reduce risk for pedestrians at grade crossings is to improve the design of these crossings and implement safety devices more consistently.  The current safety provisions for pedestrians at grade crossings are rather poor.  While all active grade crossings in the passenger territory except for the three yard examples listed above have flashing lights and bells, many do not have gates protecting all pedestrian paths.  And even those that do have only a single, thin cross bar, which is very easy to duck under.  Fencing is often incomplete, so if you have a stiff neck or back you can literally just walk around the lowered crossing gate and cut across the tracks.  Lighting can be very hit or miss, especially if the road doesn't have its own streetlights.

On railroads that rely more heavily on pedestrian crossings, you can see they offer a much more robust design that is safer for pedestrians.  In 2008, the FRA published a report summarizing the variety of different safety devices employed by railroads across the country, and there has been even further innovation in this area over the last decade.  Denver's newly-built RTD regional rail system, relies heavily on at-grade pedestrian crossings at its stations, and I think their design standards check a lot of the right boxes.  Photos from one of their A Line stations are shown below:

(Photo: The LIRR Today)

(Photo: The LIRR Today)

A couple things to take note of:

• The grade crossing—and the entire station area surrounding the tracks—is fully fenced in, so there is no way you can accidentally or unintentionally make your way onto the tracks if you are not paying attention.
• The grade crossing is separated from the rest of the station area with swing gates emblazoned with large and clear signs.  These gates are designed so that they open out away from the grade crossing.  This means that: there is free egress from the crossing itself, and anyone who is entering the crossing must pull the gate towards them (again reinforcing that you are about to cross a set of tracks).  The gates are also hung so they open in the same direction, and you have to face yourself in the opposite direction of train travel on the closest track (e.g. so you have to look down the line to see if a train is approaching)]
• The crossing is equipped with flashing lights, and there is a set of lights low to the ground, in the pedestrian's line of sight as they look down to pull the gate open towards them.  There are also flashing bells.
• The crossing is well lit and there are no other obstructions preventing you from seeing down the track to check if a train is approaching.

There can be ways to upgrade the safety and security of these pedestrian crossings to further discourage people from attempting to cut across the tracks.  For example, the swing gates can be fitted with magnetic locks and crash bars, so that when a train is approaching and the crossing is activated, the magnets engage and it becomes very difficult or impossible to pull the gate open from the outside.  However, the insides of the gates have crash/push bars that immediately disengage the magnet allowing someone who is already on the crossing the ability to easily exit.  

And it's possible to go up even more notches, still.  One of the most robust (and perhaps very over-designed) pedestrian crossings I've ever seen is actually on CSX right here in NYC, on the Randalls Island Connector bike path in the Bronx.  You can see these safety devices in action in the video below (skip to the 5:10 mark in the video to see the action):

This extreemly elaborate pedestrian grade crossing has everything: flashing lights, bells, pedestrian crosswalk signals (which are more familiar to pedestrians and give affirmative confirmation that it is safe to cross), full-height automatic gates that swing closed and lock when the crossing is activated, and even a second set of gates that blocks off access to the tracks when the crossing is not activated (this would prevent someone from wandering onto the active right-away).  This setup is pretty much impenetrable—unless you intentionally stay inside the crossing gates when it activates, there is virtually no way for someone to bypass the safety devices here and cut across the tracks, nor is there a way for a pedestrian to accidentally or intentionally wander onto the tracks at the grade crossing.  RT&S had more details on the technical design of this crossing in their March 2020 issue.

Now, this level of protection is probably overkill for most situations.  In this case, this is a heavily trafficked bike route during the summer, and this rail line is a spur off of CSX's Oak Point Link and serves the outgoing New York Post printing plant.  While I believe CSX's visits to this spur are infrequent, due to the layout of the sidings and the location of the switches, any car switching that has to occur can require the train to foul or cross back and forth over the crossing for an extended period of time (signs at the crossing say the gates may be closed for up to 1 hour at a time for train movements).  Without such barriers, people would probably try to cut around or through the train as the crew is trying to spot cars on the sidings, which would be a recipe for disaster. 

Underpasses and overpasses

The next level up for pedestrian crossings is to grade separate pedestrians from the tracks altogether using underpasses or overpasses.  In addition to sidewalks on road overpasses or underpasses, the LIRR also has a number of pedestrian underpasses ("foot subways") and overpasses ("foot bridges"), most (but not all) of which can be found at stations.  This also does not count cases where the tracks or platforms are on viaducts and pedestrians can move about freely beneath the structures.

Pedestrian underpasses and overpasses do not require people to cross the tracks at grade (meaning there is a significantly reduced risk of people being struck by passing trains), but they are generally more expensive to construct and often less convenient for passengers to use, as pedestrians have to walk further and usually climb stairs to use them.  The wide majority of LIRR's pedestrian underpasses and overpasses are not step-free (and making them accessible to people with mobility impairments usually involves adding a minimum of two elevators), and there are also many cases where road overpasses/underpasses either have no sidewalks at all or if they do have grades that are difficult for people with mobility impairments to use.

An underpass at Stewart Manor station
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

Notice the large height differential between the newer
Intermodal Center overpass and the old east foot bridge
at Mineola station (Photo: The LIRR Today)

When it comes to deciding between underpasses and overpasses, each has a number of pros and cons.  Underpasses are generally easier for passengers to use simply because of the height differential—for a pedestrian underpass, the structure only needs to be about 7 to 10 feet below the track level to fit a person.  But for overpasses, the height differential needs to be much larger—most of the LIRR is built to "plate C" (15 ft 6 in) or "plate F" (17 ft 0 in) clearances, which would have to be maintained as a minimum standard.  More realistically, the railroad should beginning to gradually expand its clearance envelopes...at a minimum by starting to add 10 to 12 inches for a potential future conversion to overhead catenary electrification (and there should be a coordinated freight clearance expansion program for the northeast).  So really these overpasses have to be at least 18 feet high—and the LIRR has been building new ones even higher than that—which means that passengers have to climb more than double or triple the number of steps to cross over the tracks.  This is the same reason why the LIRR has been eliminating grade crossings almost exclusively with the use of road underpasses in recent decades (for a road, the vertical clearance only needs to be 14 feet).

But underpasses can sometimes be perceived as unsafe—they are often not well lit, they are narrow, it is easier to have more blindspots and bends, they are places where trash or water can accumulate (as everything often tends to blow downhill and accumulate at the lowest point), and they are not open to the air (which means they can smell).  

@LIRR east new york station. Everyday it look like this. No care. Not even a garbage can. You may not have put the trash there but you definitely don't care to remove it or try to give the base minimum of cleaning. It smells horrible, filthy, unsafe. pic.twitter.com/yORYUqeDqB

— hear my voice! (@Gimmedaloot16) January 17, 2021

The underpass at Garden City (Central) station
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

Poor maintenance should not on its own be a reason to not do something, and these underpasses can be designed to maximize safety and security.  Ideally, they should be as wide as possible and designed straight across with staircases at both ends perpendicular to the tracks (e.g. there are no obscured bends or blindspots where people might be able to hide).  They should also be as well lit as possible, especially at the ends (so there are no dark spots as you go down the stairs into them during the day).

It has been ages since the LIRR last built a pedestrian underpass.  In 2009, the MTA even closed the underpass at Bay Shore station and replaced it with a newly built overpass.

Kings Park's unsophisticated pedestrian overpass
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

Overpasses also tend to run the gamut of different designs, from very rudimentary metal or concrete structures with no real protection from the elements (like the overpass at Kings Park, pictured at the right), to slightly more robust covered and enclosed overpasses, like the pair of overpasses at Cold Spring Harbor.

LIRR generally builds its overpasses without elevators—with a small handful of exceptions (off the top of my head: Woodside, Jamaica Portal, Hillside, Mineola Intermodal, Wyandanch station, Ronkonkoma middle, and Huntington middle) none have elevators and the LIRR expects passengers with mobility impairments to find their way to the other side of the platform either using grade crossings or detouring onto local streets.

The overpass under construction at Carle Place 
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

The large structure adjacent to the eastbound platform
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

Lately, the LIRR has been building overpasses that are more and more elaborate—bordering on the point of excessiveness.  As part of the Main Line Grade Crossing Elimination Project, in particular, the MTA is pouring quite a lot of money into these.  At Carle Place—a station with a measly 418 weekday boardings pre-pandemic—you can see the mammoth structures being built.  The main span sits much higher than the old overpass, and is flanked with two buildings larger than most people's houses, complete with two elevators, enclosed stairwells, lobby spaces, etc.  This is all stuff that's nice to have if the MTA had unlimited money, but it doesn't, and it seems just a little extravagant when you consider that there are far busier stations with no overpass at all, and still unfortunately too many stations that are not accessible at all to people with mobility impairments.

Elsewhere along the corridor, the MTA is going even further overboard.  At Westbury—an elevated station that already has a step-free underpass route between the tracks, the MTA is building two mammoth overpasses, each with large, enclosed lobbies and two sets of elevators (the second overpass was added as a concession to avoid property takings for ramps/staircases at the east end of the station).

Between New Hyde Park and Westbury, the MTA is building at roughly 16 elevators into station overpasses/underpasses...not counting elevators dedicated to the parking garages (four at Westbury, two at Carle Place, four as part of grade crossing eliminations east of Mineola, four at Mineola station itself, and two at GC-Merillon Avenue station).  And this is all at stations the LIRR purports are already fully accessible.  

In the truest sense of accessibility and equal access, yes, every single overpass should definitely have a step-free route, so people with mobility impairments can get between the tracks just as easily as able-bodied passengers.  But the MTA's haphazard approach to accessibility improvements has resulted in conditions that are extreemly disparate from station to station.  With the number of elevators the MTA is adding to stations it already claims are fully accessible, they could make 100% of the remaining LIRR stations step-free.  But the money is being spent along this corridor now, so that's where the elevators go, not to where they might do the most good ("to those that have, more shall be given...")

Realistically, there should be a coordinated, systemwide station access strategy that determines which stations should be prioritized for grade crossings, underpasses, overpasses, elevators, etc.  But there's none of that, instead the MTA seeks to do as little as possible until they get sued.  More on this a little later...

There are alternatives to costly elevators, however.  The simplest and most straightforward alternative are ramps, and for these circumstances, ramp towers.  Instead of an elevator, step-free access is provided with the use of a long or zig-zagging ramp that goes from the platform and street level to the overpass or underpass.  People rag on ramp towers as an alternative to elevators, but I have always been a fan of preferring passive access—and ramps are much cheaper to install and never break down after they are built.  And it's good to see that the MTA's new Chief Accessibility Officer Quemuel Arroyo seems to share a preference for passive access where possible.

Now it's not hard to see how ramp towers get the thumbs down from people...  ADA requirements dictate a 1:12 maximum slope for accessible ramps (every 1 inch of vertical rise needs 12 inches of horizontal run), which means for an 18 ft high overpass, you need upwards of 216 feet of ramp distance, or closer to 500 feet of total travel distance by time you go up, across, and back down.  If you are in a manual wheelchair or are otherwise mobility impaired, that can be a tall order to to twice per day.  This is a particular area where the height differential in overpasses vs. underpasses are particularly important—for an underpass, the ramp length would need to be only about 84 feet, or less than 175 feet of total travel distance.  Again, this all needs to be a matter of balancing...ramps should not be a complete replacement for elevator access where warranted, but rather it should be used to supplement elevators, or provide new step-free routes at stations that don't currently have them.

Two sets of ramps to an underpass provide step-free access to and between
the platforms without elevators at Greenvale (Photo: The LIRR Today)

Ramps are also used at Westbury (Photo: The LIRR Today)

The ramp tower to the overpass at the new Arthur Kill station
on Staten Island (Photo: Kew Gardens 613)

There are four examples on the LIRR where ramps to underpasses are used: at Flushing-Broadway, Westbury, and Greenvale stations, and at the West 7th Street foot subway in Deer Park.  The first and last are the truest examples of this concept, and unfortunately I don't have good photos of either on file (you can see some photos of the Flushing-Broadway station underpass here, and both are visible on Google Streetview, linked above).  Pictured at the right are the ramps to the underpasses at Greenvale and Westbury stations.

An example of ramp towers to a pedestrian overpass can be found at the new Arthur Kill station on the Staten Island Railway—these are already much longer than the underpass examples stations pictured at the right, and SIR has lower clearances than mainline railroads.

Ramp towers work best when paired with an underpass and side platforms (they can work with island platforms, but you end up losing a lot of the footprint of the platform unless it is very wide).  This would be an obvious and low-cost solution to provide step-free access to the platform at Locust Manor (which is currently not accessible) and provide supplemental passive access at stations like Flushing-Main Street, Queens Village, Huntington, etc.  Even at all of the elevated South Shore stations, there is enough of a footprint at one or both ends of the island platforms to install a ramp tower to provide passive/supplemental step-free access without taking up a lot of platform space.

Coordinating station access

Given the importance of station access, it is important to make sure there is a cohesive strategy to make sure there is adequate access to and from stations (and between multiple platforms at stations).  These strategies should also balance the need to make stations accessible to people with mobility impairments and control costs. 

Station access strategies should be set up to minimize the amount of time people have to spend walking, and to better and more naturally spread riders out along the length of the platform.  Generally, riders shouldn't have to walk more than 4 carlengths (about 350 feet) to reach an access point to and between platforms.  

Replacing this staircase at the west end of
Glen Head would cut a more than 0.35 mile
accessible path down to just 350 feet
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

Effort also needs to be made to make sure that access for people with mobility impairments is comparable to stair access at stations—at many stations, ramps for people with disabilities were only installed at one side of the station, meaning that people in wheelchairs or who have difficulty using stairs often need to go even further out of their way to find a ramp.  To this end, staircases should be paired with ramps wherever possible (and especially at ground-level side-platform stations where this would be easiest to implement).  Ramps should be the default means of access, with stairs used when there are space constraints.  There are plenty of examples where current stations can be made more accessible by simply swapping out staircases for ramps.  In the example at the right, from Glen Head station, the only ramps at the station are at the east end of the platform.  This means that someone with a mobility impairment has to move more than a third of a mile to detour to Glen Head Road and double back—replacing this with a ramp wouldn't make things harder for able-bodied passengers (this just leads to a long sidewalk) but would cut the travel distance down to just 350 feet.

Accessible travel distances should also be minimized, with a goal of distances to a step-free access point not exceeding about 6 carlengths (about 550 feet) to minimize how far people with mobility impairments have to move to access a station or cross the tracks.

To determine the best strategies for station access, stations should be broken up into two distinct groups:

• Branchline stations are on lower-traffic branches that generally have few express trains (e.g. the diesel branches and the small small electric branches in Nassau County)
• Mainline stations that have much higher rider volume and are on lines that often have express passenger trains

This distinction is important as it factors into the viability of pedestrian grade crossings as a means of improving access.  The MTA has historically been very averse to adding new grade crossings, but while grade crossings are undesirable, they are not 100% evil—the important thing is to identify the places where they do and don't belong.  Pedestrian grade crossings with adequate safety features located immediately to the west and east of stations pose relatively low risk at branchline stations—in these circumstances, almost all trains passing over the crossing are making a station stop and so are traveling well below track speed.  This makes it much easier for both the train crews and errant passengers to respond and avoid a collision.  All equipment trains should really be converted to passenger runs (instead of wasting so many operating hours not carrying passengers), but as an added measure of safety for these or other non-revenue trains, slowing the remaining express trains down over grade crossings adjacent to stations (to limited or medium speed, not slow/restricted speed) can add crucial extra seconds that could avert a collision.  At mainline stations, where there is a larger number of higher-speed express trains operating through the area, grade crossings come with a much higher risk, and so grade-separated routes (using underpasses or overpasses) should be preferred.

At branchline stations (stations with few express trains):

• Stations with platforms 1 to 4 cars long (400 feet or less): at least one access route, at least one of which is step-free (ideally two accessible routes, at either end of the platform)
• 1 or 2 grade crossing with ramps at either or both ends of the station (with enhanced safety features similar to the RTD examples above)
• 1 underpass with ramps
• 1 overpass with ramps
• 1 overpass with elevators
• Stations with platforms 5 to 8 cars long (400 feet to 750 feet): at least two access routes, at least one of which is step-free (ideally two accessible routes, at either end of the platform):
• 2 grade crossings with ramps at both ends of the station (with enhanced safety features similar to the RTD examples above)
• 1 grade crossing with ramps and 1 underpass with steps
• 1 grade crossing with ramps and 1 overpass with steps
• 1 underpass with ramps
• 1 overpass with ramps
• 1 overpass with elevators
• Stations with platforms 9 to 12 cars long (750 feet or more): at least three access routes, at least one of which is step-free (ideally two accessible routes, at either end of the platform):
• 2 grade crossings with ramps at both ends of the station (with enhanced safety features similar to the RTD examples above) and 1 underpass with steps
• 2 grade crossings with ramps at both ends of the station and 1 overpass steps
• 1 underpass with ramps and 1 underpass with steps
• 1 underpass with ramps and 1 overpass with steps
• 1 overpass with ramps and 1 overpass with steps
• 1 overpass with elevators and 1 overpass with ramps
• 1 overpass with elevators and 1 overpass with steps

At mainline stations (stations with many express trains):

• Stations with platforms 1 to 4 cars long (400 feet or less): at least one access route, at least one of which is step-free (ideally two accessible routes, at either end of the platform)
• 1 underpass with ramps
• 1 overpass with ramps
• 1 overpass with elevators
• 1 grade crossing with ramps (with extraordinary safety features similar to the CSX example above)
• Stations with platforms 5 to 8 cars long (400 feet to 750 feet): at least two access routes, at least one of which is step-free (ideally two accessible routes, at either end of the platform):
• 1 underpass with ramps
• 1 overpass with ramps
• 1 underpass with steps and 1 grade crossing with ramps (with extraordinary safety features similar to the CSX example above) 
• 1 overpass with steps and 1 grade crossing with ramps (with extraordinary safety features similar to the CSX example above) 
• 1 overpass with elevators
• Stations with platforms 9 to 12 cars long (750 feet or more): at least three access routes, at least one of which is step-free (ideally two accessible routes, at either end of the platform):
• 1 underpass with ramps and 1 underpass with steps
• 1 underpass with ramps and 1 overpass with steps
• 1 overpass with ramps and 1 overpass with steps
• 1 overpass with elevators and 1 overpass with ramps
• 1 overpass with elevators and 1 overpass with steps
• 1 underpass with steps and 1 grade crossing with ramps (with extraordinary safety features similar to the CSX example above) 
• 1 overpass with steps and 1 grade crossing with ramps (with extraordinary safety features similar to the CSX example above) 

Below are some conceptual examples of these types of access strategies (these are conceptual in nature only, for some specific examples, I have a handful of station-specific examples sketched out in this folder):

The LIRR has generally been doing a better job of adding access points and making existing access points accessible as parts of complete station rehabilitations (like the total rebuilds happening along the Main Line for the Main Line Grade Crossing Elimination project), but these are often being overlooked at stations that are only getting minor upgrades (like through the Enhanced Stations Imitative) and certainly nothing is being done at stations that are not slated for upgrades or total remodels.  It should not require a total rebuild for the railroad to take a look at station access systemwide and see where they can make minor tweaks (e.g. adding a ramp, a staircase, or changing a staircase to a ramp)—these types of improvements require only a little money and a little effort but can deliver major benefits when it comes to improving people's commutes.