In Las Vegas, and rode the Deuce bus up the Strip. Despite charging a very premium fare ($4-$6) and having a ton of potential demand, the experience was positively dreadful! Bus averaged <3 mi/hr (slower than walking pace) along the resort portion of the strip—~10x longer than Uber to downtown.

How do people think the test of the projects are paid for? It all comes out of our pockets one way or another. Just a question of which pocket. Who paid for the $12 billion spent on East Side Access? We did. 20 cents out of every fare dollar goes to debt service.

I'll settle for ordering a seat on a not canceled, on time flight!

Less than two months to the end of MetroCard sales and @mtalirr.bsky.social are STILL bullying senior and disabled riders who present reduced fare OMNY cards onboard trains, even though MTA's website says it is 100% valid proof for half fares. www.reddit.com/r/nycrail/s/...

I did some analysis from ticket sales from the MLX outages for 3rd Track in 2019. There is a modest shift towards the South Shore But the big takeaway was that a lot of trips just don't happen (people stay home or drive). LIRR lost 25k-30k riders each weekend. www.thelirrtoday.com/2020/09/main...

The age old issue with a Bergenline subway is how you connect it to the places people want to go. Yes, it's a very strong corridor, but there's not a tremendous amount of local N-S traffic. People want to go to NYC, Hoboken, DT JC, elsewhere in NJ.

This is key to me. Parts within the MTA seem to still be fighting open gangway trains, even though they've been a success here and everywhere else. Institutional inertia and the need for changes to some procedures cannot stand in the way of capacity and rider experience.

Found this part of Lieber's interview very interesting. The most expensive fares in the western hemisphere charged by the two railroads he runs pushs many poor people in the outer boroughs, Nassau, and Westchester onto far slower bus-to-subway trips—and MTA has done very little to address that.

Love the MTA's constant quest to reinvent the wheel and come up with something worse. pix11.com/news/transit...

I've expressed my thoughts on this before, but the MTA can't take every opportunity it gets to take a cheap shot at Amtrak (and treat Amtrak horribly on their portion of the NEC) and then be surprised Amtrak is not moving at breakneck speed to get more MNR trains gumming up their Hell Gate Line.

Wild!

Several reports over the last few weeks that NJT has started checking tickets at station entrances during the AM rush. Started at places like Elizabeth (busy station, close to city, ok) but is now apparently being done on the Gladstone Branch and in Montclair?? JFC. www.reddit.com/r/NJTransit/...

So bus fare evasion explosion actually did not start as soon as the MTA started collecting fares after the Covid free buses period – at that point, evasion was not that different from pre-Covid. It was more closely associated with the OMNY rollout, which starting getting people off of passes.

A tough fall of trackwork will get tougher: there will be no LIRR service through Hicksville the weekend of November 7-8. LIRR is going back to the pre-Third Track plan: —Ronkonkoma trains will use DM's, operating BI-HOURLY via Babylon —Huntington trains end at Mineola, buses to HVL, SYT, CSH, HUN

If even the fictional Halloween subway map makers can imagine a rail connection to Staten Island, why can't the MTA?

Dozens of LIRR workers use phony ID cards to steal time, as one boss sips margaritas at his pool: report

Map says San Francisco, but that is obviously a Metro-North trash can. I don't know MNR stations enough to pick up which one, but it looks like it's on the Harlem Line.

Fun bit of Subway trivia...what is the westernmost Subway station?

This is what cheeses me off about their planned ticketing changes. I won't be able to buy a paper ticked a couple days in advance of my trip because the conductors might not punch my ticket (aka do their job) and I'll get a free ride, so I should get punished. Meanwhile, their staff pull this crap.

Does anyone at LIRR actually work and doesn't just spend every shift figuring out how to scam and cheat? @mtaoig.bsky.social published yet another scathing report detailing brazen, widespread fraud. It just doesn't seem to end. 36 employees (7 supervisors) implicated. mtaig.ny.gov/Reports/2025...

Despite nearly a decade of proof that there remains a rampant culture of fraud and abuse at LIRR, @mta.info and LIRR officials continue to fail to take appropriate action to curb the problem. Our fare hikes, tax increases, and congestion tolls at work... www.newsday.com/long-island/...

I disagree that NYS FOIL allows agencies to extend due date an unlimited number of times. The law says that agencies must respond in 5 business days and provide a "date CERTAIN and within a reasonable period" If agency needs to extend due date 10x, the original date obviously wasn't certain...

Yup. 6 months of 40-min Newark headways, Grove Street bypassing, JSQ headways cut to 20 mins, and the extra Exchange Place detour were all announced with only about 2 weeks notice... The PA and PATH's commitment to better transparency has been full of shit from the start.

"PATH is committed to sharing five months of anticipated weekend work schedules with riders"...but again riders are in the dark w/ only 2.5 months posted. After 20 yrs of cuts for trackwork, are we getting 10 min svc on all 4 lines back Jan 1? Or is PATH still scheming up new excuses to cut svc?

30 minute gap in downtown R service at the height of rush hour. Very bad.

This proposal from Cuomo is a joke, but there does need to be a change within the MTA to better priotizie expansion projects inspead of ploughing tens of billions into SOGR...the 2025-2029 program is horribly unimaginative. CDBT should have been dedicated to Network Expansion w/ clear link.

Stefanik is wrong and just making a fuss, but this has been talked about in the past in connection with pushing Metro-North further north. MTA's dedicated taxes are manifestly unfair to the suburban counties, so I'm not surprised the people of Columbia and Rensselaer would be concerned about it..

There are plenty of spare passenger cars out there (from the nation's commuter railroads that are carrying a fraction of their pre-pandemic ridership) that can be used to run the Heartland Flyer or whatever so Amtrak could restore full Empire Service (or at least extend trains to maintain capacity)

That's frankly not NY's problem. And that's why I said East River Tunnel outages are a red herring. Empire Service cuts have nothing to do with ERT outages. Real reason is Amtrak has redeployed elsewhere. It's important to call that out since there are better solutions to that problem than this!

Meh. It's good to see Hochul's office thinking outside the box and taking an interest in transit outside the MCTD, but Amtrak's reasons for cutting Empire Service are red herrings and I'd rather see that addressed than a token MNR round-trip with different terminal, tickets, fares, operator, etc.

Also, this bit about there being nobody to take over Transport of Rockland is not true. We already have a state authority charged with the "development and improvement of commuter transportation and other services related thereto within the [MCTD]" which, as MTA always forgets, includes Rockland!

But I guess the reverse lesson is... If a private company was profitable until 2025 running such a shit system, how come a well run public system can't manage better than 30% farebox recovery

No website, a separate (higher) fare from the NJT buses, a GTFS feed that's expired for 3 years, etc. I like seeing transit being accountable to farepayers, but getting rid of these one-off operators and harmonizing the services into the NJT bus network is good for riders.

Bayonne's Broadway Bus says it will be shutting down in November, ending a long run for what is one of the few private bus lines remaining in the urban metro area. The notice says NJT will take over the route, but no sign of it on their website yet. www.reddit.com/r/BayonneNJ/...

Seastreak has moved from Pier 11-Wall Street to the Battery Maritimie Building. BMB is the eminently better city terminal for ferries...the Subway connections are definitely better though the facilities are more limited.

Harrison is a good example of how you need good transit AND more than just market-rate, luxury housing to make a downtown/neighborhood vibrant. Harrison is great if you work in FiDi and own a car to go everywhere else. bsky.app/profile/jame...

Agree 100%. This is the original sin with East Side Access and LIRR expansion that led to us blowing $17.7 billion on capacity expansion only for LIRR to end up running fewer peak trains to/from Long Island than they did in 2019! Need to measure outputs not inputs, and work backwards from end goal.

New Subway experience today: riding an up escalator and some idiot is standing on the left side, blocking people from waking up. Guy behind her says "excuse me", and this lady turns around and starts freaking out on him! He looked like he wanted to throw her down the stairs...hard to blame him.

RT

This whole saga with the downstate casinos (along with cannabis licensing) shows just how ungovernable New York has become. Is it better than what's going on in other parts of thy country? Probably. But, good heavens, this constant regression to the status quo is certainly frustrating.

We’re never getting all-door boarding buses in America, our transit agencies are totally clueless about how all of this fits together

13 billion reverse branch

I get the reflexive opposition to highway expansions, but if they built a connector road to fully grade separate the junctions between the BRP/Sheridan it would do a lot to get interchange and overflow traffic off the service roads and out of conflict with pedestrians/bikes.

The what line??

A nice story. Getting on and off at each stop (and only doing about two stops a day) is a unique twist on this... www.newsday.com/long-island/...

Eliminating value of 10 ride #LIRR passes by reducing their validity period is shrinkflation. From 1 year to 6 months to ́nothing.

0/3 working OMNY machines at Atlantic Terminal. Truly remarkable how bad this has gotten. They shouldn’t be allowed to conduct fare enforcement until this situation improves.

The original sin with the DC Streetcar (same with the DC Circulator) was allowing it to be a one-off thing directly managed by the district instead of it being WMATA's responsibility We have the same problem in NY...MTA gobbles up virtually every cent for transit in the region & suffocates the rest

MTA CEO Janno Lieber said today that NJTransit "raised prices by over 20%"...so I guess we are just making stuff up now. www.youtube.com/live/cFRc_1t... (32 min) Even with NJTransit's 15% fare hike last year, they have still managed to keep fares significantly lower than the MTA since 2010...