MTA marks millionth rider through new LIRR terminal at Grand Central Madison
After a stumbling start of Long Island Rail Road service to Grand Central Madison, MTA officials on Tuesday said they’d worked out the kinks, and that the proof lies in the ridership numbers.
More than 1 million passengers have passed through the new terminal since its opening in January, with an average of 50,000 people each weekday.
MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber called the 1 million passenger mark “a really happy and significant milestone.”
Last week, MTA officials said, the LIRR as a whole carried more than 200,000 riders each weekday — saw its highest average ridership since the pandemic lockdown of March 2020.
Scheduling tweaks and additional train cars mean the LIRR is handling that increased ridership, the MTA chair said.
“The crowding issues that we had on about a dozen trains a day in the first week or so pretty clearly have disappeared,” Lieber said.
“We’re tracking how many cars are going over our standards in terms of crowding — 90% of capacity,” he added. “I think for almost all days we have zero trains over 90% of capacity.”
“On time performance is back on track, up over 93%,” Lieber told reporters.
After full LIRR service began operating out of Grand Central Madison in late February, the commuter railroad was snarled with congestion as trains were pulled from Penn Station.
The new schedules eliminated nearly all direct service from Long Island to Brooklyn, causing many passengers to encounter long wait times and missed connections when they were required to change trains at Jamaica.
LIRR interim president Catherine Rinaldi acknowledged “a little bit of bumpiness” in the weeks following the station’s opening, but said subsequent service tweaks had smoothed out the ride for most commuters.
“We have been listening to our customers,” she said. “We continue to listen to our customers, and we have been making tweaks along the way.”
Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Council to the MTA — which criticized the agency in the weeks that followed the station’s opening — said the authority had made important schedule adjustments quickly.
“We’ve seen them be responsive and continue to take rider concerns into consideration,” Daglian said. “One million riders into Grand Central Madison in just four months is really quite an accomplishment.”
Daglian said she hoped scheduling adjustments planned for the fall would help riders avoid missed connections on east-bound trains, which continue to be a problem.
As more foot traffic flows through Grand Central Madison, the voluminous retail space added to the system by the new terminal remains empty.
Lieber said Tuesday that the MTA plans to issue a request for proposals for a bar and restaurant in the space in the coming months.
The agency continues to seek a single firm to manage and curate the remaining retail space at the terminal, said Lieber.
