NEW YORK — A plan announced on Wednesday to merge the problem-riddled Long Island Rail Road with the relatively civilized Metro-North Railroad has drawn both raised eyebrows and tentative praise, according to the New York Times.
No one is sure what the merger planned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will ultimately mean for the hundreds of thousands of riders who use the two systems to commute to and from New York City every day. Authority officials said the move would save money, improve service and eliminate duplication in areas like administrative services and capital planning.
“There are good parts of Metro-North and bad parts,” said Tom Kelly, a spokesman for the authority. “There are good parts of the Long Island Rail Road and bad parts. Let’s bring them all together and take only the good parts.”
But some Metro-North commuters said they were worried that they had more to lose than to gain.
“I think what commuters are going to be concerned about is, is the quality of the service on Metro-North in any way going to be brought down to the level of what Long Island riders have to endure?” asked Jim Cameron, vice chairman of the Connecticut Metro-North Rail Commuter Council, an advocacy group created by the Connecticut Legislature.
The merger is part of a restructuring plan that Peter S. Kalikow, the chairman of the transportation authority, said would be submitted for approval to the State Legislature this year and phased in over two years. Another part of the plan involves merging Long Island Bus and New York City Transit bus lines under the umbrella of M.T.A. Bus, a development that some have suggested is linked to the seven-week strike by workers for Queens bus companies that ended in August.
An agency called M.T.A. Capital would oversee expansion projects for all divisions of the authority.
But the merger of the two commuter railroads has quickly become the most talked-about change. “The stabilization and expansion of the region’s economy requires a regional approach to the provision of commuter rail services,” Mr. Kalikow said in a statement.
Mr. Kelly, the authority spokesman, said the plan had the strong support of Gov. George E. Pataki.
By many accounts, the Long Island Rail Road has improved since the days when the preponderance of broken air-conditioners, delayed trains and surly employees spawned Web sites like www.ihatethelirr.com and nicknames like “Wrong Island Rail Road.” In 1999, the average Long Island Rail Road car traveled 28,578 miles without breaking down; on Metro-North, the mean distance between failures was 70,533 miles.
Last year, 1,100 riders surveyed by the Long Island Rail Road Commuter Council, a government-appointed panel, graded the service a C-plus, complaining that there were too few seats on trains and too few parking spots in station lots. There were also positive signs, with riders applauding the new double-decker trains.
Metro-North is not subject to similar annual surveys, Mr. Cameron said. But when it comes to figures like on-time performance, Metro-North generally comes out ahead. According to the most recent figures, Mr. Kelly said, its trains are on time 97.8 percent of the time, while Long Island trains are on time only 94.7 percent of the time.
Keith Peterson lives in Hastings-on Hudson, N.Y., and takes Metro-North to and from work in New York City. Friends and co-workers have told him enough stories about Long Island commutes to make him hope that the situation does not change. “I hope Metro-North management stays in control,” he said, “because they are much better than L.I.R.R.”
But Peter Haynes, president of the L.I.R.R. Commuters Campaign, an independent group, said he hoped Long Islanders’ commutes would improve. “In just about every objective way you can measure performance, they do better than the Long Island Rail Road,” he said of Metro-North. “This does present a rare opportunity for optimism among L.I.R.R. commuters, about seeing actual improvements as opposed to just hearing the lip service that they’re so used to.”
On Long Island, Mike Wilson, 27, of East Northport, said he favored the merger “as long as they don’t run the rates up.”
It seems clear that some of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 62,000 employees will lose their jobs in the course of the restructuring, but it is not clear which ones. Mr. Kalikow said that he did not expect “a dramatic change in that figure” and that the plan would not unilaterally change the authority’s collective bargaining agreements.
On Long Island, some commuters said they hoped their sprawling train system, for all its problems, would keep its name. “You can’t change the name of the Long Island Rail Road,” said Tom Krausz, 50, of Stony Brook. “That’s history.”