The Penn Station Crowd Gauge

The best barometer of whether or not you are going to get home on time is the crowd you see coming down the stairs into Penn Station.

If the crowd is huge and just milling around instead of intently walking to their track you know there is a problem some place in the system. At this point all you can do is hope some other poor slobs will be late instead of yourself. Yes, that is a pretty nasty way to look the situation, but you know darn well that everyone is thinking the same thing.

The other item that makes a commuter a bit less of a louse for having such wicked thoughts is the fact, and I mean fact, that even if your line is humming along, while the Long Beach branch is stopped cold, that someday the tide will turn and it will be you sitting in Tracks nursing a beer waiting for the LIRR to fix the problem.

Although sitting in a bar is not a bad thing. I remember many years ago when I was commuting out of Grand Central and sitting in a bar across the street during a delay when the TV announcer said that the tracks north would be shut for at least another hour. The entire place cheered.

LIRR Fare Hike?

I read today in the N.Y. Daily News that the MTA is in the midst of battling with its various unions regarding pay increases. The MTA offered no increases for three years citing funding shortages. The unions rejected that offer, went to arbitration where they won an almost 3% increase for each of the next three years.

This is all fine and dandy except there is no money to pay this increase. Except through fare increases. There are already 4% increases scheduled for 2015 and 2017, but those do not take into consideration any employee pay hikes.

The MTA said it might be able to scrape up a few extra bucks via savings in other areas.

Well, I have an idea and it dovetails perfectly with one of my biggest commuter pet peeves. The total mess that is found alongside the tracks. I've ridden most of the LIRR branches at one point or another and they are all strewn with junk, and not all of it is garbage.

I would send teams up and down each train line to pick up all the discarded tools, rails, wooden ties, buckets and left over pieces of metal that are lying around. There are literally tons of wastage to be found along all the LIRR track beds. It appears as if the workers finish a task and simply leave everything there to rust. Don't the workers have to account for all the tools they use? How can they simply leave perfectly good shovels and wrenches lying around?

So I say how about picking up and fixing all these items before they pass along any additional fare hikes to the rest of us.

All Aboard

After years of complaining to my friends on Facebook about my experiences on the LIRR, it was suggested to me by Dina Santorelli that I create a blog.

I am quite sure the inspiration for her suggestion came from her no longer caring whether or not the 6:53am was stuck in Cold Spring Harbor due to a broken rail, but after thinking about it for half a day I decided she was correct.

First and foremost this blog will be for those other folks who stand on those cold, dark cement platforms every morning, hugging their cup of coffee and simply hoping that their train will arrive on time, and more importantly that it will still be functioning in the evening when they try to get home. This blog will extend to my brother and sister commuters on N.J. Transit and Metro-North. We are all in the same boat, in a manner of speaking, so I think most of my musings will translate.

I'll start this off with a little background on myself and where I intend to take this blog.

I've been commuting on the Port Jefferson line out of Northport since late 1999. Over my 14 years on the LIRR I have been through a lot, numerous fare hikes, long and short-term service disruptions, leaves on the tracks and whatever else the good people at the Metropolitian Transporation Authority can throw at me. However, I don't want this blog to be nothing but a laundry list of my daily complaints. While I could certainly fill pages with such blatherings that would soon become tedious and frankly I would not be telling a fellow commuter anything he or she already did not know.

Instead I'll try and tell short stories about what I see both in and outside the train that has always either caught my eye or made me curious. In addition, I will lean a bit on my journalism training and try and find out a few answers to my questions.

So barring any track congestion here we go.