Temporary LIRR Shuttle Service To Grand Central Madison Is Putting Lipstick On A Pig

The original Federal Transit Administration Capital Investment New Starts Full Funding Grant Agreement to MTA was approved in 2006. It included a project cost of $6.3 billion, federal share capped at $2.6 billion with the start of passenger service including a promise to run 24 hourly trains rush hour (most of which were supposed to provide a one seat ride) in 2011. The temporary shuttle service is a temporary band aid fix coming nowhere close to meeting this commitment.

Shuttle operations between 6:15 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. on weekdays and from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekends comes nowhere close to existing LIRR frequency and service hours in and out of Penn Station.

With shuttle trains operating only every 30 minutes during rush hour, imagine the potential overcrowding on shuttle trains between Jamaica and GCM. There is no local service for Kew Gardens and

Penner Station

Forest Hills riders during rush hour.

Riders on the Port Washington branch will have to transfer at Woodside for access to the shuttle train rush hour and off peak.

The project cost has grown to $11.6 billion today. This does not include debt service payments of $1 billion for borrowing costs buried under the MTA operating budget. There are also $4 billion worth of LIRR readiness projects to support the start of service They take place east of the Woodside Harold Interlockings and are carried off line from the official project budget. Without these projects, the LIRR lacks the expanded operational capabilities to support both promised 24 rush hour train service to GCM along with a 40% increase in reverse peak rush hour service.

Penn Station is a 24/7 facility with overnight service to and from between 1 AM and 5 AM. Grand Central Terminal is closed overnight from 2 AM to 5:15 AM. Unlike the LIRR, Metro North provides no service in or out during that time period. Why does MTA hold the LIRR and Metro North to different standards when it comes to utilizing these two facilities? Ms. Catherine Renaldi is the first MTA official to serve as President of both Long Island and Metro North Rail Roads. The LIRR

Karl V. Anton, Jr., Publisher, Anton Community Newspapers, 1984-2000

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Linda Baccoli should provide equal levels of 24/7 service to both Penn Station and GCM customers.

When it comes to East Side Access, the LIRR 1960’s motto “Line of the Dashing Dan” should be changed to “Line of the Slow Moving Sloth.”

Larry Penner is a transportation advocate, historian and writer who previously served as a former Director for the Federal Transit Administration Region 2 New York Office of Operations and Program Management. This included the development, review, approval and oversight for billions in capital projects and programs for NJ Transit, New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, NYC Transit bus, subway and Staten Island Railway, Long Island and Metro North Rail Roads, MTA Bus, NYCDOT Staten Island Ferry along with 30 other transit agencies in NY & NJ.

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Batten down the hatches. Nassau County is running out of phone number combinations that begin with the area code 516.

Since the 1950s, Nassau and Suffolk County businesses and residences were assigned a phone number with the area code 516. In 1999, you would have thought the world was ending when it was announced that Suffolk County numbers would be switched to 631. But the sun came up the next day, and thus the great “Area Code Rivalry” was born, with Nassau County residents celebrating and taunting the obviously second-class “631-ers.” As an added insult, Suffolk got a second area code, 934, in 2016.

Honestly, I’m not sure the area code means much anymore.

It used to be that you could recognize an incoming call just based on the area code, but the fear of Y2K changed all that in 1999. Manhattan’s exclusivity of