RVC residents: ‘Summer of hell’ is more of the same

Commuters weigh in on LIRR amid Amtrak repair work

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As dozens of Rockville Centre commuters filed onto a 7:35 a.m. Long Island Rail Road train bound for Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal on July 14, one resident who entered hopped back off.

“I jumped on and I said, ‘Wait a minute, where’s the other one?’” explained Noelle Zola, who was confused by the altered train schedule during the first week of Amtrak’s emergency repair work at Penn Station.

She then waited for her intended train into Manhattan at 8 a.m. — the 7:35 a.m. train goes to Brooklyn now instead of Penn — rolling her eyes as an announcement blaring from the platform’s loudspeaker detailed the repairs and alternatives for commuters to consider. “It’s been bad before this,” she noted of the LIRR service. “It just makes everything more difficult, everything takes longer, the train’s, crowded and nobody’s really happy to be on the train.”

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has warned commuters of rail service disruptions while repairs are made from July 10 to Sept. 1, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo dubbed the 54-day period the “summer of hell.”

Though last week marked the official start of the repair period that MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota acknowledged in an open letter to commuters as “a serious inconvenience,” frustrations among Long Islanders who travel to and from New York City regularly is not new. Local officials and residents gathered at the Rockville Centre station in May in response to delays, cancellations and other disruptions to rally for a sane commute.

“It was worse before this,” said one village resident who declined to give his name, about the service during the “summer of hell.” He added that by catching a train between 6 and 7 a.m. and coming home after 7:30 p.m., he has been able to avoid disruptions, and was barely affected last week.

“The only problem I had one night going home was that we sat at the platform for 10 minutes before we left,” he said, “but compared to what was going on for the 18 months before that, this has been better.”

The MTA announced before July 10 that three new LIRR trains would run into Penn Station and that 36 rail cars would be added to Manhattan-bound trains. A new network of 200 buses, with free service for LIRR ticket holders from eight Long Island commuter parking lots to various Midtown locations — running Monday through Friday from 6 to 10 a.m. and 3 to 7 p.m. — was also added. A free ferry service for customers has also been operating during the same times.

State Sen. Todd Kaminsky, whose office sits opposite the station, was vocal at the May rally — saying that commuters were “being treated like complete garbage” — and has been equally critical as the summer repairs began.

“My concern right now is that our ability to respond to a crisis has already been decreased through the loss of three tracks during the summer repairs,” Kaminsky said in a statement last week. “This has caused our alternatives, like Hunters-point Avenue, to become flooded with new transfers. Right now, everyone is holding their breath and hoping that nothing breaks, because they know when it does that it is really going to hurt.”

The MTA is offering a 25 percent fare discount, on average, to LIRR ticket holders who choose to travel to Hunterspoint, Atlantic Terminal, Long Island City, Nostrand Avenue or East New York instead of Penn Station. In addition, free transfers are being offered to LIRR travelers at Atlantic Terminal, Hunterspoint and Jamaica.

But some residents who work in Manhattan said the discount isn’t worth the longer trip, or that the re-route is logistically impossible for them. Most commuters the Herald interviewed also seemed to agree that last week, though not worse, was simply more of the same unpredictable service.

“I’d say over the last four or five months, it’s been the worst it’s been in 10 years, and there’s just no reliability, there’s no seats [and] the price has gone up,” Rockville Centre resident Kyle Curmuck said. “It’s unbelievable, and I think they need to go in there and change all sorts of management.”

The State Senate last month approved Lhota as MTA chairman after Cuomo nominated him. He previously ran the MTA from October 2011 to December 2012, and oversaw the city’s subway system during New York’s recovery from Hurricane Sandy.

Tamara Jones, who works in Midtown Manhattan, said that she has made an effort to head back to Rockville Centre before the late-afternoon rush hour, adding that she decided to work from home — which her company encouraged its employees to do — for some of last week to avoid being affected.

“There are times when the train, especially in the evenings, will say it’s going one place, and then it changes direction and there’s a bunch of other people getting on the train,” Jones said. “It doesn’t help that I’m pregnant, because people don’t want to give their seats up.”

Kelly Cummings said her commute during the first week of repairs has been relatively painless, though she had to change her train time. She also has permission from her Manhattan employer to work from home a few times a week because of the “summer of hell,” and said it being labeled as such helps people understand what commuters face daily.

“I’m glad they did that, because I think it energized companies to be more creative and adaptive to their employees,” she said. “Did it scare people? Yes. But did it create some action? Probably.”

To learn more about the repairs, or to explore other commuting options, visit www.lirrsummerschedule.com.