(The following article by Joie Tyrrell was posted on the Newsday website on February 16.)
NEW YORK — Ridership on the Long Island Rail Road dropped for the third straight year last year.
Overall ridership dipped slightly, while the number of rush-hour riders fell by 3 percent.
LIRR officials blamed the drop on a weakened economy, changing work patterns and the lingering impact of Sept. 11, 2001, but LIRR President James Dermody said Tuesday he expects ridership to rebound. There were 79.9 million riders in 2004 compared with 80.9 million in 2003 — down from a high of 85.6 million in 2001.
“New York City is bouncing back and you are going to start to see ridership coming up,” Dermody said. “I think if we can improve our reliability and improve our performance we will attract some riders back.”
Still, the railroad never fully recovered riders after the last fare increase in 2003 when prices jumped an average of 25 percent. And LIRR ticket prices will rise again in March by an average of 5 percent.
LIRR officials released the end-of-year ridership numbers at a Metropolitan Transportation Authority meeting Tuesday.
Officials at Long Island Bus also released ridership numbers, showing a slight increase from 30,436,695 riders in 2003 to 30,594,795 in 2004.
“That’s our sixth annual increase in the last seven years,” said Long Island Bus President Neil Yellin.
Dermody pointed out that although railroad commuter ticket sales may have declined, there was a 1.4 percent increase in the number of riders taking the trains during off-peak hours.
James McGovern, chairman of the LIRR Commuter’s Council, a riders’ advocate group, said he expects the declines to either flatten or reverse.
“In my experience, hiring is up in Manhattan and I really think that ridership is going to turn the corner,” he said. “I personally would never drive into Manhattan from Long Island and I don’t know why anyone would.”
Railroad officials also detailed results of a customer satisfaction survey Tuesday that showed that passengers gave the LIRR an overall score of 6.1 on a scale of 1 to 10, down slightly from 6.4. The railroad polled 12,000 riders in the fall, asking for input on everything from platform cleanliness to on-time performance.
Passengers gave the lowest mark of 4.5 to the cleanliness of the restrooms and the highest mark of 7.2 to “effective ticket sellers.”
The request of most riders was simple — better on-time performance. The railroad posted an on-time performance of 92.7 percent last year, compared with 93.1 percent the year before.
“We are analyzing the reasons for the drop” in satisfaction, Dermody said. “We are also analyzing what the customers told us.”
McGovern said the recent fare increases likely influenced the results as well.
But Ronkonkoma riders may soon have something else to complain about. LIRR officials have proposed increasing parking fees at the garage at the station from $30 to $40 a month and from $3 to $4 a day and implementing fees of $4 a day at the 346-space paved surface parking.
“In our budget, there was a requirement for us to pick up additional revenue,” Dermody said. “The railroad has to maintain that lot and the cost of maintaining that is going up and we are looking to recoup that with parking fees.”
The parking fee increases go before the full MTA Board later this month.