Via Garibaldi 8

Something else that the  is good at doing and that is telling lies.  They went in front of the media and claimed that they were making MASSIVE changes to the schedules after admitting that they screwed up (to put it mildly), but in reality, they haven't gone nearly as far as they claimed they were going.  I can say in dealing with them that they have instances where they make promises and then change course. I had asked them in a meeting to have some bus stops restored. I was promised that they would look at it and nothing came of it, so in sum they are hoping that people will stop complaining so that they can just leave some of the schedule as is, which still f**** over a chunk of the LIRR ridership.

Another major complaint has been last minute track changes and wrong track announcements, which is just inexcusable.  I've never had that problem with Metro-North. I check the app, the train runs on that track and if there is a last minute change, they announce it with enough time to make the track change.  What the LIRR is putting out is a disgrace.

5 minutes ago, BM5 via Woodhaven said:

It wasn't just not soliciting feedback, but actively being condescending about it to, effectively going them a "f**k you". I mean, consider what Janno Lieber's position was all this time leading up to it:

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/transportation/mta-east-side-access-eg7fx4fq
 

It's been a while since that's been out, and tbh I'm kinda surprised nobody is saying anything regarding those comments. He answered it in such a bizarre way. Either he couldn't come up with some corporate gibberish to hide the incompetence, or he was being real honest with how he felt here (neither of which is good, but one is worse than the other). 

Of course now Janno is changing course with his comments. That's only because he has to though. 

He's echoing the ridiculous comments made by Catherine Rinaldi (current LIRR & MNRR president), who said that "riders will adjust". To downplay the issues that have been documented with various videos showing people scurrying from one train to try to get another one located on another platform with mere minutes to spare, to people missing their connections entirely at Jamaica because their first train was late and didn't leave enough time to transfer. It's clear incompetence. I don't know who this @xD4nn guy is, but he should stop while he's ahead. The LIRR f**** up royally here and now are trying to backtrack and the schedules are still a mess overall.  The transfers are still not coordinated as they should be and there are still too many gaps in service where riders are facing much longer commutes than they did before.

43 minutes ago, xD4nn said:

GCT has 3 times more ridership than Atlantic Terminal and ridership is still increasing. Writing to elected officials won't do much when the majority of riders go to GCT/Penn. 

What does that have to do with the overcrowding that is happening at Penn?  That's where the majority of the complaints are coming from, so your response makes no sense. The majority of the ridership is still at Penn and that's who is circulating the petitions.  The gaps in service are extensive at times, esp. for those who had direct service and now have much longer commutes, but sure, continue slobbering on about GCT and how ridership is still increasing when trains are leaving there empty while Penn sees massive overcrowding. lol

55 minutes ago, B35 via Church said:

Putting it on scheduling with this new LIRR plan is giving the MTA a gargantuan out.... The issues (plural) with this new plan is clearly macro; one of that of planning... Of course you want people to access/utilize the new station, but the fact of the matter is that they went far too far left with shoving GCT in commuter's faces.... Everything else that happened after that (that commuters have raised valid concerns about) was/is a result of a nasty domino effect...

Tweaking the current schedules, nor reverting back to the old schedules would amount to a quick fix.... A good start would be a composite of what made the old plan/service setup good (or at least adequate enough) & what makes the current plan good or adequate enough (aside from merely running trains to a station that previously didn't exist!!!!)...

Another part of the problem is that Jamaica is poorly designed for the purpose that the new plan has it being used (more) for.... There's a significant difference between [getting from. say, track 14, to the 7th av line... or from track 20 to the 8th av line at Penn], to [getting from track 1 to track 11 at Jamaica] - Especially considering the fact that the xferring is being done below ground at Penn, and into the/with the elements (weather/outdoors) at Jamaica....

I'm trying to refrain from using the word petty (because LIRR riders' complaints when it comes to this are valid), but realizing how those riders are, I can easily see a class action lawsuit against the MTA happening in the future as a result of this new plan... You could argue tight connections exacerbating matters,, but the increased amount of xferring between different platforms didn't necessarily have to be a thing to begin with....

There was a lawsuit started previously by an attorney who uses the LIRR citing massive overcrowding and safety concerns. I don't know what ever happened with that lawsuit because it was started pre-COVID if memory serves me, but I can say from my personal experiences dealing with the  I haven't met anyone working there that wasn't capable. I think this is a mix of trying to push people to use Grand Central, arrogance, and also not listening to the needs of riders.  I have seen some petitions circulated and people beginning to write elected officials (as they should).

When you give riders draft schedules, solicit feedback and then do nothing with that feedback, there is a serious disconnect with leadership.

16 minutes ago, RestrictOnTheHanger said:

I remember reading in the specs or other documents that batching transactions would be a feature to reduce swipe fees, along with negotiating with card networks. In theory this should extend to the website but based on this change, guess not. 

Speaking of batching, I used my phone instead of my OMNY card for a SBS trip and was not charged until early the next morning despite the trip posting on the OMNY site real time. I wonder if all contactless transactions are now being batched and aggregated as described above. 

I'm sure they are trying all sorts of things to keep those fees down. They need all the help they can get because aside from this issue, there are so many OMNY readers that are busted. They're either frozen where they stay on the intro screen, but don't react when anyone tries to tap, "NOT IN SERVICE" or just off. lol To show you how bad it is now, I still find myself getting one or two free rides a month due to busted readers and I only use public transit a few times week or less.  This is in addition to me usually paying just $6.75 round trip, as I set up my trips to where I take one express bus in and then walk, run my errands and then take another bus back or whatever or there are times when I don't even bother taking the bus back. I grab an Uber home, as was the case the other day.  I wonder how much money they are losing between people not using passes, work-from-home, broken OMNY readers, etc.

1 hour ago, mikecintel said:

I see.  Ahhh that can be reason why they raise the reload amount and there are "processing fees" using a credit or a debit card.  I didn't think of that.

I'm pretty sure that the  gets charged a lower rate (processing fee rate) for each transaction because of the volume that they do, but if they are processing lots of transactions that are just $1.00 or whatever people are reloading with, that can be cost prohibitive, and eventually you start paying out more than you're taking in. That is something that has to be watched, be it a business or a public agency like the to mitigate overhead costs. There are a few ways to handle this problem: 

Raise the minimum card transaction to ensure that the processing fees aren't becoming cost prohibitive, or renegotiate the processing fees with the card processors (unlikely if they have an agreement in place) or charge different fees depending on the which payments company is used (the fees vary between say Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex, etc. and Amex has generally always charged the highest processing fees, but that is usually offset by the fact the Amex customers tend to spend more money). Some places do just that, or they don't accept say American Express at all since their processing fees are the highest. 

One thing to keep in mind... There are no passes yet for OMNY, so I am sure that is depressing the amount of the transactions considerably. Maybe they will change the minimum again once OMNY has pass options, but maybe not, since fewer commuters use passes now, meaning each transaction tends to be for a smaller amount compared to pre-COVID.

3 hours ago, RestrictOnTheHanger said:

The minimum card reload amount on the OMNY site is now $5.50, used to be $1. This was a very recent change

2 hours ago, mikecintel said:

I can't find it on the OMNY website in the "terms and conditions".  So it is not for purchasing the card right? When I go to the OMNY website it still says "This OMNY card costs $5 to purchase and must be loaded with a minimum of $1 or a fare product at the time of purchase. For more information on fees, please see omny.info/terms-of-service, or contact OMNY customer service at omny.info/contact or (877) 789-6669." 

Where did you get the information?  Wow that is steep from $1 to $5.50.  Wow it is a $4.50 increase! If that happens and when you purchase an OMNY card you need to load a minimum of $5.50 you have to load it and add with $5 with the card then the total price of the OMNY card will be $10.50!.  For $0.25 more I can take from Zone 3 to Zone 1 on the LIRR peak fare for that amount.  That is price gouging but then now with the current economy it's "inflation"

2 hours ago, RestrictOnTheHanger said:

Trying to reload my card on the OMNY site myself. I don't know if this change affects the load required when you buy a card. 

2 hours ago, mikecintel said:

OK I see.  Yes when I logged into my OMNY account it does say that.  WOW if the MTA does implement that when you buy a new OMNY people will have riot and then you will see it on the news.  Thanks for the update.

I needed to reload my card today while I was out and thought it was just because I was using my phone, but yeah, the change must've happened a few days ago. Pretty annoying.  I put enough for about six express bus rides.  Normally I just put enough for three or so rides, since I only use transit now once or twice a week max.  

They must be getting too many processing fees from people loading a $dollar or two on the card.  $5.50 represents two rides on the local bus or subway.

44 minutes ago, N6 Limited said:

What will be the excuse once MetroCards are decommissioned? 

That they don't know how to tap. I've seen it already. People get on with a credit card that has the chip in it and they try to tap with it. lol A card with a chip is NOT the same thing as a contactless card. People are so dense.

2 minutes ago, ABCDEFGJLMNQRSSSWZ said:

Teaching kids how to manage peer pressure is something I think schools and parents often don't do a very good job of; it's particularly difficult because teens tend to rebel against authority so if presented in the wrong way, it may just encourage kids more. The best way is generally to empower them as individuals. with unique identities, hobbies, and personalities because when that's accepted, it also becomes less of a rat race to just do the most sensational thing.

Managing peer pressure is a very important skill to have, both from a safety and general happiness perspective imo.

Unfortunately, kids of today are more followers than leaders, which is another problem.  I never felt pressured to do anything by my friends.  We all did what we did by choice.

2 hours ago, biGC323232 said:

Me personally the  should have left service the way it is until GCM demaded an service increase.....Just cause it serve the east side doesnt means everybody gonna use it..Like u said they completely said the hell with brooklyn and everything now going to/from GCM which is totally not fair...They should have left the service as a shuttle from GCM -JM for a few months longer to actually see the ridership patterns...Like u  also said its cause of the money spent on GCM....

Of late they have been sending out tons of surveys asking about service. It doesn't make any sense to send them out if you're not going to listen to what your customers are asking for.  Despite claiming that they were making changes to fix the schedules, LIRR riders are still complaining this week about severely late trains, missed transfers and overall chaos, esp. people going to Penn or Atlantic Terminal.

You may very well see some people switch to driving if this continues. It makes no sense to pay a premium to constantly have to worry about arriving to work on-time.

11 hours ago, 7-express said:

I heard today that the MJ Quill roof deck reconstruction is going to cause some schedule changes at CP depot staring with the April pick.  Looks like they won't be able to stage buses in Manhattan anymore so all buses will have long deadheads from CP depot into the city for the PM rush.  Do you have any more information on this and how jacked up the schedules might be come April?

What I can say is a number of CP lines already deadhead back and forth from Queens, so if they do it right, it shouldn't impact service too much. We shall see.

3 hours ago, 7-express said:

I heard today that the MJ Quill roof deck reconstruction is going to cause some schedule changes at CP depot staring with the April pick.  Looks like they won't be able to stage buses in Manhattan anymore so all buses will have long deadheads from CP depot into the city for the PM rush.  Do you have any more information on this and how jacked up the schedules might be come April?

I haven't heard about any changes to schedules, but it's possible that more express buses will have to deadhead from Queens. I do wonder if they can store any more express buses at the depot up in Harlem, which is what some Queens express buses do now and then they come down to Midtown and start like that.

17 minutes ago, ABCDEFGJLMNQRSSSWZ said:

How much of this stuff is biological vs environmental gets into a very deep discussion, and I will concede that compared to many, I am more on the “cautious” side for my age.

However, I do see extreme discrepancies in the lifestyles and activities of teens in NYC who go to more “privileged” specialized high schools vs some of the worst high schools in rough parts of the city.

At my high school, stuff like drug addictions, bingo drinking, teen pregnancy, and toxic relationships certainly exist, but far more seldom than some of these other high schools where you can literally smell Marijuana just by being near the building. I don’t blame those teens; many were dealt a bad hand between poverty, single-family households, and disengaged parents, but if we as a society placed more emphasis on giving teens the quality of support and nuture I’ve been fortunate to receive in my life (both through home and school), I guarantee you’d see a decline in these sorts of issues.

You can look at the data in a map; teenage deaths, teen pregnancy, and underaged crime correlates strongly with poverty. While there’s not data to prove it, I would imagine the same is true of people dying from subway surfing.

Anyways don’t mean to derail the entire thread. Have a pretty good night!

There is some truth to what you stated, but some of it is just good old peer pressure, or kids doing whatever they think is cool.  I can say from personal experience with the group I hung out with as a teen, we had some people that were rational and others that took things to the extreme. 

10 minutes ago, ABCDEFGJLMNQRSSSWZ said:

Lol yep, the wait last year frustrated me as well.

I think I’m most curious to see if there’s a notable divide in ridership rebound between wealthier neighborhoods generally associated with college Ed professionals compared to the rest of the city.

I can answer that. The answer is yes.  It's been reported in the media on a number of occasions that most of the rebound in subway ridership is coming from working class to poor neighborhoods.  The wealthier areas are where you have more people that work from home or they work a few days a week and come in later or leave earlier.

https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/6/23/23180669/working-class-stations-drive-ridership-recovery

Ridership patterns are also different too.  In my area, most of it is not covered by the subway, but as ridership has come back on the express bus lines I use, it has mainly been off-peak ridership that has increased because we are working from home, thus more leisure trips.

6 minutes ago, ABCDEFGJLMNQRSSSWZ said:

Biologically, yes, teens are risk takers; I myself am a teen so I understand. However, taking an extreme risk with a high chance of ending your life is not normal; this makes me think he really wasn’t aware of the dangers of subway surfing and just heard about other kids casually doing it in his school or smtg.

By 14/15/16, people should have a basic sense of reason telling them things like Subway Surfing could kill you, and if they don’t that makes me think something is wrong.

Yeah to you, but everyone's sense of what is risky and what isn't is quite different.  Some people by nature are dare devils or "adventure seekers".

3 hours ago, ABCDEFGJLMNQRSSSWZ said:

I tend to agree with you overall but I don't necessarily think we can just assume the mom did a bad job at raising him, but moreso conclude something overall was probably wrong in the environment he grew up in; it could be a consequence of bad parenting, bad friends, other bad adults in his life, or a combination. It's entirely possible that his mom was really just lazy or bad, but maybe she did the best she could given the circumstances and wasn't able to overcome other factors pushing him towards this.

Lack of fathers is also a really sad issue I don't think gets enough attention; the stats around it tend to be insane and speak for themselves.

There are plenty of people with good and engaged parents who end up having extreme issues for other reasons.

There doesn't have to be anything wrong in a kid's environment for them to do what he was doing. Young people think they're invincible.  Everybody has their limits on what they find tolerable and not tolerable. The fact that he was up there with his girlfriend tells me he was doing something he enjoyed, as dangerous and crazy as it was and he didn't think anything would happen, which is why he turned to talk to her in the first place.

18 minutes ago, ABCDEFGJLMNQRSSSWZ said:

Still, they release the data every year, and I imagine the return in ridership is not evenly distributed around the city.

Yes, but the last few years they've been releasing it later and that could be one of the reasons why.

1 hour ago, ABCDEFGJLMNQRSSSWZ said:

This is a fair point; right now outside of delays, crowding generally isn't that bad across the system.

However, based on the last census, NYC seems to have accelerating growth, and over the next decade I suspect subway ridership will slowly continue to tick back up to be what it was before. I actually feel like this might be an opportunity because as people see these trains that were fine for a few years slowly become more sardines, it might place more emphasis on trying to increase system capacity than there was before when it was just normalized.

2023 ridership stats will be especially telling imo cause this is probably the first year where COVID doesn't have a heavy loom over things; many places still had covid restrictions in place into 2022 and were continuing to keep folks working from home.

One thing I am frustrated by is MTA still hasn't posted any official 2022 ridership data; we know the final number systemwide is just over a billion, but I'm very curious to look at ridership trends by station. Does it usually take them this long to post these sorts of things?

Yes, and part of it is they already know that ridership is still around 60% of what it was pre-COVID, so it isn't anything exciting to post per se.

What's with all of this talk about overcrowding when ridership is still only about 60% of what it was pre-pandemic?

9 minutes ago, IAlam said:

At this point, it seems the conductors are spread so thin I'm riding into Manhattan again without getting my ticket checked even on empty off-peak trains. The last time that was frequently happening to me was during the pandemic. 

That or they just don't feel like checking them.  I took MNRR this morning (semi-express train) and my conductor checked.  I would say out of the MNRR branches, I find it more common to not be checked on the Harlem line, either because the train is crowded or they just don't care and on the New Haven line, occasionally from points in Westchester down to Fordham.

1 minute ago, B35 via Church said:

Before I started driving to work when I was in Mineola, man, it got to a point on those 2 trains out of Atlantic Terminal in the 5 am hour, c/r's stopped bothering to check anyone's tickets before the train got to Jamaica.... They would start checking them AFTER the train left Jamaica.... I never forget one time I showed my weekly to one of the c/r's, he gave me a nasty smirk, before saying "yeah, thanks" - as if I was some sort of nuisance by, you know, actually wanting to prove fare payment.... I would go WEEKS without pulling my weekly pass out of my bag before I actually got a c/r that recited anything close to a "tickets please" before we got to Jamaica on those morning trains.... Of course, on the Ronkonkoma train I would xfer to across the platform to get to Mineola to, those c/r's would start asking for tickets, basically the second the train pulled out of Jamaica.....

Pretty sure those c/r's on those scoot trains (which is what I'm going to call them from now on) b/w Atlantic Term. & Jamaica aren't pulling that shit anymore.

There was a time when I would ride MNRR to 125th St from GCT and I stopped even buying tickets because they would never check. Now with the LIRR which I have used over the years, I have generally been checked, but I've had a few times where I've rode for free, and this had nothing to do with any train being crowded either. Personally I find the Hudson Line to be ok, provided you are getting on or off where they check. There are a few stops where they still don't, or what some people do is if they get on at say Yankees-153rd or anywhere before Marble Hill, they just hide in the bathroom and then get off at Marble Hill. I've seen that a lot pre-COVID and at first I didn't realize what was going on, but then it all clicked when I kept seeing it.

I tend to take semi-express trains now whenever I do use MNRR, such as this morning, so if I get on in Riverdale or Spuyten Duyvil, they will usually check before we get to Harlem-125th. I get a CityTicket anyway, so it doesn't even matter. It's only good for the day, so I just activate it. My use is so minimal now that I'm lucky if I use the railroad a few times a month. lol

24 minutes ago, xD4nn said:

Man, you don't even know how anything works here at LIRR...

Yeah it's very hard to understand ticket collection. lol

4 hours ago, B35 via Church said:

She's doing the irresponsible parent victim thing wrong here.....

You either commence with the lawsuit & take zero responsibility in any of this, or you admit the boy had no business train surfing, in your further wanting to discuss subway surfing prevention measures....

 

This was bound to happen sooner or later, that is someone suing for their kid's reckless behavior. I can picture the  settling out of court to put this to rest quietly.  Outside of that, I'm not sure what else they're supposed to do.  There was a hearing (IIRC) that Janno Lieber recently attended, where he was asked what the  planned to do about subway surfing.  

1 minute ago, xD4nn said:

I know multiple conductors and they have no problem collecting tickets.

That's nice that you know multiple conductors. Still has nothing to do with those who can't collect on the overcrowded trains.  Hell I've been on a number of trains where it wasn't crowded and I essentially got a free ride over the years.  They've been better on MNRR about collecting them, but depending on where you are going, it is totally possible to ride for free for several weeks at a time.

22 minutes ago, xD4nn said:

Who said that? Do you understand how they collect tickets during rush hour?

I've been a railroad commuter for many years, probably longer than you've been around, so save your holier-than-thou attitude for someone else like you need to explain to me how tickets are collected. lol Are you serious with yourself? A number of LIRR commuters have posted that the trains are so crowded that they can't collect tickets, and I can assure you that all of those people aren't using monthly passes either where they just occasionally check them.