One of the MTA's major selling points for the $12+ billion East Side Access project was the significant time savings it would offer Long Islanders who want to commute or travel to Manhattan's East Side, saving them, as the MTA claimed, 40 minutes of travel time every day. But results from a past MTA Customers Count survey shows that East Side Access and the more than $17 billion in capacity improvement projects the LIRR has brought online has not resulted in door-to-door travel time savings for most riders.
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| The long amount of time it takes to exit from the ESA caverns water down much of the time savings (Photo: The LIRR Today) |
Overall, 45% of respondents said that the opening of East Side Access and LIRR service to NY-Grand Central resulted in a reduction in their door-to-door travel time. 34% say there has been no change in their door-to-door travel time. 21% of respondents said that their travel time has gotten longer since the start of East Side Access.
Drilling down into the time ranges, only 22% of riders say that East Side Access is actually delivering that 40+ minutes a day in travel time savings the MTA celebrated. 10% of respondents are saving 15-20 minutes on their weekday inbound trips, 6% are saving 10-15 minutes, 5% report saving 5-10 minutes, 2% report saving less than 5 minutes. On the other side of the coin, 1% of respondents say their trips have gotten longer by less than 5 minutes, 5% longer by 5-10 minutes, 5% longer by 10-15 minutes, 4% longer by 15-20 minutes, and 6% of respondents say their travel times have gotten longer by 20 or more minutes.
While there are always winners and losers in any major service overhaul or schedule change, the fact that more than 1 in 5 respondents say their travel time has gotten longer thanks to the fruits of more than $17 billion in capacity improvements is quite disappointing.
I am actually surprised that even as many riders responded that they are saving travel time as they did. When you look at just the schedule times, running times have gotten longer due to trains generally making more stops and more schedule padding. Then when you add in connections, which can be long especially during off-peak hours, it eats away at a significant chunk of that travel time savings. Riders tend to underestimate their actual travel time, and riders were also being asked to compare their travel time to trips in 2022, when LIRR was still running reduced rush-hour service, with more local trains and awkward gaps between trains.
The phrasing of the questions were also quite confusing. Riders were asked to evaluate their most recent, westbound, weekday trip, which looks like it tripped a lot of people up (and also limited the universe of trips that have been impacted by these changes.
Depending on what branch you are on, there may be more winners or losers. The branch with the most riders reporting travel time savings is in the City Terminal Zone (Jamaica and points west) where there are more trains making local stops and travel times tend to be short in the first place. On the Long Island branches, fewer riders responded that East Side Access has reduced their travel times.
Branches with the most riders reporting their travel time has decreased include the Far Rockaway Branch (48% of trips shorter), Port Washington Branch (47% of trips shorter) and West Hempstead Branch (46% of trips shorter).
While the West Hempstead Branch reported a higher share of riders seeing travel time savings, they also saw the most riders reporting that East Side Access changes resulted in longer trips, with 32% of riders saying their trips are now longer than they were before East Side Access. That is followed by the Long Beach Branch (31% of trips longer) and Far Rockaway Branch (27% of trips longer).
The branches that had the fewest riders reporting additional travel time are mostly the diesel branches, where there were very little service improvements or changes with East Side Access.
Travel time changes were perceived more positively by off-peak riders, where 45%-52% of off-peak and reverse-peak riders reported that their trip was faster than before East Side Access (but also remember, in the last few years leading up to the completion of East Side Access and Third Track, LIRR reduced off-peak service on several lines that resulted in longer than usual baseline travel times). But during the AM Peak period, where there are many more riders, fewer riders reported that East Side Access has saved them time, while 1 in 4 AM Peak riders say their journey is now longer than it was before.
This correlates to trip purpose...riders who are travelling for or commuting to work (which tend to travel during the peak periods) have the largest share of riders reporting that their travel times have gotten longer, with 26% of riders saying their trip takes longer than it did before East Side Access. For non-work leisure travel—where riders tend to have more flexibility on when they travel so they can steer towards direct trains with shorter travel times—fewer riders report that their travel times are longer.
It might come as no surprise that travel time changes are heavily correlated to what city terminal you are using. Riders that are travelling through NY-Grand Central, as you might guess, overwhelmingly report that their trips are shorter. But on the other hand, nearly half of Brooklyn riders say that East Side Access has lengthened their travel times. For those still using NY-Penn Station, there are more people that say their trips are longer than shorter.
This pretty clearly shows that most of the travel time savings for those headed to Midtown East is coming at the expense of longer travel times for most other riders.
Long walks eat up most East Side Access travel time savings
Even though NY-Grand Central may be better located for those who work on the East Side, the design of the new station—where the LIRR trains are buried in a cavern 140 feet below street level—means that it takes quite a while to just get out of the station once your train pulls in and the doors open. This is significantly different from the LIRR's other terminals, where the layout is simpler and more compact (NY-Penn Station isn't quite simple, but the layout is compact...if you know where you are going, you can get from the street to your train very quickly).
Shortly after East Side Access opened, I measured walking times between different locations at the LIRR's major terminals to offer a more empirical look at actual door-to-door travel times. The deep caverns and long escalators mean that it can take several minutes after your LIRR train pulls in to actually get to the street or the Subway. At NY-Grand Central, the fastest possible route from LIRR trains to the street (to 47th Street and Madison Avenue) takes more than four and a half minutes. If you are going to one of the other GCT entrances more central to 42nd Street, it can take between six and eight minutes to wind your way through the concourses, staircases, ramps, and escalators to even just get out to the street—then you have to actually walk to your destination.
These walking times are markedly higher than what we see at NY-Penn Station. While the layout of NY-Penn Station is a lot more confusing, it is also a lot more compact—so if you know where you are going and enter through the right entrance, you can get to your platform quite quickly. From 7th Avenue (where most LIRR riders enter), you can get to your train in as little as 90 seconds. From 8th Avenue, again you can get to the LIRR tracks in as little as 1 minute, 3 seconds and in most cases under 2 minutes. Even if you enter all the way west at 9th Avenue through Moynihan Train Hall, it only takes a little over 3 minutes to reach LIRR trains.
The LIRR's alternate terminals in Brooklyn and Queens are even easier and faster to navigate through. If you are travelling through Brooklyn-Atlantic Terminal, you can walk from the street to the platform in about 30 seconds.
And at Hunterspoint Avenue, the single LIRR platform can be reached from the street in just about 24 seconds.
All of these extra minutes and seconds really add up, especially if you have to cover more distance on foot once you leave the LIRR terminal to get to your destination. This is especially an issue at NY-Grand Central, where the LIRR terminal is set up further north (between 45th and 48th Street) from the main hub of activity closer to 42nd Street on the East Side.
If you are connecting from the LIRR to the Subway, that takes a lot longer at NY-Grand Central as well. Getting from the north end of the caverns at NY-Grand Central to the Lexington Avenue Line platforms at NY-Grand Central takes over 10 minutes (so long that when the MTA posted a video showing the fastest walking route, they had to speed up the video). That's nearly twice as long as it takes to get to the Subway at NY-Penn Station, where it takes about five minutes, and significantly longer than it takes at Brooklyn-Atlantic Terminal (a little over 2 minutes) or Hunterspoint Avenue (less than 2 minutes).
Again the long walking times cancel out most of the time savings offered by East Side Access. If you are commuting from Long Island to Lower Manhattan (Wall Street and Broad Street, for example), travelling via NY-Grand Central takes the longest out of the LIRR's four city terminals. The fastest route from Jamaica to Wall Street & Broad Street are:
- via Brooklyn-Atlantic Terminal: 33 minutes, 32 seconds
- via Hunterspoint Avenue: 40 minutes, 15 seconds
- via NY-Penn Station: 41 minutes, 43 seconds
- via NY-Grand Central: 44 minutes, 20 seconds
If you are sticking around Midtown, the long walk to the Subway at NY-Grand Central means that it is often faster to just walk to your destination on foot than to connect to the Subway for a short hop. If you are trying to get to Times Square (corner of 42nd Street and 7th Avenue), it takes a little over 6 minutes to get there from the LIRR platforms at NY-Penn Station vs. over 19 minutes from the LIRR platforms at NY-Grand Central.
The 40-minute fallacy
There was never all that much truth behind the MTA's claim that East Side Access would save riders "40 minutes a day". Even according to the trip planner on the MTA's own website, riders can get from NY-Penn Station to NY-Grand Central in as little as 11 minutes (and if you compare that to the walking times I have recorded, that matches up). So it was really only saving at most 22 minutes a day (11 minutes there + 11 minutes back).
So the real savings in terms of onward travel time after you get off your LIRR trains is not 40 minutes, it's more closer to 6 minutes...
Therefore, any travel time savings perceived by riders is either purely perceived (a one-seat ride seems faster than a similar trip with one or more transfers...and when there are delays it sometimes is) or the result of other schedule changes not directly related to the location of the new terminal (for example, some trips from the South Shore to Brooklyn got faster because all express trains stop now stop at Jamaica, where before the only way to get to Brooklyn was on slower, local trains).
Overall, it's a bit disappointing that the more than $17 billion spent on LIRR capacity improvements did not result in any travel time savings for most riders. It's another example of how the details for how these projects really matters. Burying a new train station so far below ground it takes several minutes to even get to the surface washes away a lot of the benefits of a project. Not focusing enough on measuring outputs (actual frequency improvements or travel time savings delivered for riders) not just inputs (the amount of money spent on a project) is a critical misstep that leads to situations like this, where the LIRR is running fewer peak trains to/from Long Island than they were in 2019, and most riders haven't seen their travel times improve.
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