Metro-North has held up better the LIRR and recovered faster: May 2023 was 28% above May 2022, whereas for the LIRR, it was only 23%. Metro-North, with no opening comparable to that of East Side Access, had 5.43 million riders in May with a peak of 215,000 passengers – but pre-corona ridership was 276,000. LIRR ridership in May was about 5.6 million, with a peak of 229,000 passengers per weekday ridership before corona was 316,000 per weekday. The most recent publication about New York commuter rail ridership is from a week ago. The state promised large increases in both capacity and ridership in 2022, joint Metro-North and LIRR head Catherine Rinaldi said they were increasing service by 40%. The central transfer point at Jamaica was reconfigured to no longer permit cross-platform transfers between Brooklyn- and Penn Station-bound trains in order to facilitate more direct trains to Grand Central. In 2019, there were 589,770 jobs within 1 km of Penn Station’s northeast corner at 7th and 33rd, of whom 48,460 lived on Long Island within 1 km of Grand Central’s southern entrance at Park and 42nd, the corresponding numbers are 680,586 and 57,457.īased on such analysis, the plan was to send as many trains as possible to Grand Central, at the expense of trains that used not to enter Manhattan at all but instead diverted to Downtown Brooklyn (within 1 km of Atlantic and Flatbush there were 41,360 jobs in 2019, of which 3,895 were held by Long Islanders). Grand Central’s location is better the studies done for the project 20 years ago found that for the majority of LIRR commuters, Grand Central was closer to their job than Penn Station. Penn Station’s location is at the southwestern margin of the job concetration of Midtown Manhattan. What was East Side Access supposed to serve? The Grand Central connection does not lead to the preexisting Metro-North terminal with its tens of tracks, but to a deep cavern: The tunnel across the East River was built in the 1970s and 80s together with the tunnel that now carries the F train East Side Access was the project to build the connection from this tunnel to Grand Central as well as to the LIRR Main Line in Queens. East Side Access is a tunnel from the LIRR Main Line to Grand Central, permitting trains to serve either of the two stations an under-construction project called Penn Station Access likewise will permit one Metro-North line to serve Penn Station. Traditionally, of New York’s two main train stations, Penn Station only served Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and the LIRR, whereas Grand Central only served Metro-North. On current statistics, it appears that the opening of the new tunnel to Grand Central has had no benefit at all, making this project not just the world leader in tunneling cost per kilometer (about $4 billion) but also one with no apparent transportation value. I held judgment at the time because big changes take time to show their benefits, but in the months since, ridership has not done well. The opening was not at all smooth – commuters mostly wanted to keep going to Penn Station, contrary to early-2000s projections, and stories of confused riders were common in local media. East Side Access opened in February, about four months ago, connecting the LIRR to Grand Central previously, trains only went to Penn Station.
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