South Fork Commuter Connection eliminated

The LIRR is permanently eliminating the South Fork Commuter Connection service between Speonk and Montauk on the South Fork.  The service is being eliminated without public comment, lumped in as part of the MTA's adopted 2021 operating budget (page 235) updated at last week's MTA Board and Committee meetings.  The SFCC consisted of three round-trip trains on the Montauk Branch east of Seponk along with connecting shuttle services operated by the Towns of Southampton and East Hampton.  The trains and shuttles were suspended when the MTA moved to the Essential Service Plan in late March in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was not restored with most other weekday trains in June.  The revived SFCC lasted barely more than a year—and it didn't even run at full strength for about a month last fall when service was suspended around-the-clock east of Southampton for bridge replacement work.  The MTA says they are saving $1.5 million per year eliminating the service.

The elimination of the SFCC marks the end of this short and sad chapter of the LIRR’s poor service on the East End of Long Island.  First launched in 2009 as an alternative transit option during the CR-39 Southampton Bypass widening project, it stuck around for a couple months after the project was completed but it was ultimately wiped out as part of other budgetary cuts during the Financial Crisis.  As traffic congestion problems have grown on the East End, local officials have been trying for years to get more than a rudimentary transit service on the North and South Forks, only to be frustrated at every turn by the MTA and LIRR.

For a while, the excuse was the lack of spare equipment to operate the service…after all, in the 1990’s the railroad did buy a diesel fleet that had 15% fewer seats than the old cars they replaced (barely adequate to meet needs back then, never mind any future growth).  As part of the MTA’s 2010-2014 Capital Program, the agency included $2.8 million to develop specifications for “alternative diesel equipment” for the East End.  With persistent prodding from local officials, that was upped to $78 million to purchase that additional equipment.  But the MTA slow-walked the procurement, missing the boat on the Nippon Sharyo DMU built for SMART and UP Express, and then ultimately dropping the project completely in 2016 citing the lack of FRA-complaint DMU’s on the market.  The MTA reallocated that funding to buy remanufactured work locomotives for the LIRR—and to this day it still hasn’t spent it.

But as compensation for diverting the funds, the railroad agreed to more of a dialog with local officials.  It was mostly talk, but it did lead to some modest service improvements, including revamping weekday schedules on the North Fork, restoring year-round weekend service to Greenport in 2016, and adding a third and fourth round-trip on summer weekends in 2017.  On the South Fork, the railroad extended a single morning Speonk DM run to originate at Southampton and agreeing to partially restore the SFCC.  But even that was slow-walked, with the shuttle trains not starting until March 2019.  The SFCC 2.0 did attract some new riders to the system, though it struggled to attract meaningful ridership gains due to the limited service and frequent interruptions. 

Trains 2703 and SFCC train 2724 meet at Hampton Bays
(Photo: The LIRR Today)

The relaunched service was almost designed to fail—while it was great to have at least something there as a starting point, there were barriers to success at every turn preventing real growth.  The service offered just three round-trips, only one of which made the full run from Speonk to Montauk.  The equipment and crews were poorly utilized, with the trains sitting idle for 75% of the time.  The trains and shuttles didn't run at all on Fridays in the summer—when traffic is the worst and the need for a transit alternative is greatest.  Riding the shuttles required the presentation of a prepaid $1 voucher (until they were eliminated last January).  But the voucher had to be bundled with a one-way ticket and was only sold at five TVM’s and nowhere in the downtowns or at any station east of Southampton.  The voucher was not sold on its own, was buried under the “Deals and Getaways” menu on the TVM, and not offered through eTix.  The buses that operated were timed with trains, but were not integrated with the rest of the SCT bus network and only ran four times per day, sitting around doing nothing the rest of the time.  Despite it being a “commuter connection”, there were no commuter tickets—to ride the shuttles, you had to buy a one-way ticket for every trip, every day.

Passengers pack the platform at Southold as a westbound
train arrives on a Sunday in 2019 (Photo: The LIRR Today)

Despite the relatively paltry improvements, the handful of new trains have nonetheless paid great dividends.  On the North Fork, the railroad has seen two very strong years of ridership growth following service improvements.  Ridership on the North Fork increased by more than 50% between 2016 and 2018, and grew a further 20% in 2019, netting the railroad more than $326,000 in additional revenue over the course of the year.  On the South Fork, even though the SFCC ran at full service for only 180 days of the year, it still helped drive a 164% increase in intermediate ridership east of Speonk, helping to net the railroad about $925,000 in new fare revenue on the South Fork.  Revenue from intermediate ticket sales increased by 80% between 2018 and 2019.

The elimination of this service effectively sets efforts for rail service improvements on the South Fork back to square one.  Which is a shame, because the railroad could have really made some great progress for little expense—if they just put in a little effort.  In 2019, I detailed a number of easy and cheap ways to improve the South Fork Commuter Connection.  With better scheduling, the railroad could have increased service east of Speonk from 9 round-trips to 19 round-trips by utilizing the shuttle equipment better and making zero-cost improvements to existing trains.  Modifying the ticket machines so that all machines at all stations could sell the SFCC tickets on one-way stock, offering everything thorugh eTix, offering commutation UniTickets that were valid on both the shuttles and existing SCT buses, and selling standalone shuttle vouchers would have removed the ticketing barriers.  Running the shuttles on continuous loops all day and integrating them with the SCT network would have provided a sizeable boost to the usability of transit for local travel on the South Fork. Bolstering the guaranteed ride home program would have allowed riders to take the train with confidence, knowing they could get home if they had to if it was hours until the next train.

Unfortunately, this move is no surprise from the MTA and the Manhattan and Ronkonkoma Railroad, which have long overlooked the importance of good rail service on the East End.  Despite the East End towns paying the same dedicated taxes and fees into the MTA as everyone else, these communities have considerably less service to show for it, and even what little they do have is now being taken away.  The MTA has also been short-changing the East End on much-needed capital improvements—it diverted funding from the Ronkonkoma to Yaphank signalization project to pay for the Ronkonkoma Double Track, removed switches to passing sidings in Mattituck and Southold, and installed only a partial version of PTC on the North Fork, introducing a number of operational constraints in the process.  The new 2020-2024 Capital Program did not include any funding for concrete improvements on East End. 

Pandemic notwithstanding, the landscape has changed considerably even since the start of these talks in 2016.  New FRA equipment safety regulations now allow for the purchase of cheaper, leightweight DMU's that can operate the service faster and more economically; there are no legal or regulatory barriers to one-person train operations (meaning the railroad doesn't have to pay 3 employees to run a 1 car train); the railroad now has full signalization and PTC all the way to Montauk.  The MTA certainly needs to focus in on dramatically cutting operating costs, but there's simply no reason to deny the East End even the bare minimum level of effort at providing a usable service.  We've seen how ridership and revenue responds to a single-digit number of new trains spaced hours apart—imagine how many people might use the railroad if they ran hourly service all day...