This report, prepared by Regional Plan Association for the Rauch Foundation, addresses a number of transit issues facing Long Island. The two suburban counties of Long Island, Nassau and Suffolk, house a population of 2.8 million people who live in an area of 1,200 square miles stretching from the New York City border to some 100 miles to the east. In that area the population makes some seven million trips daily, most by private automobile. Transit, other than on school buses, accommodates about 460,000 of these trips, or under seven percent. Of these about 350,000 are made on the Long Island Rail Road, the transit life line for Long Island connecting it to New York City. Long Island Bus, a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, operates a 330-vehicle bus network, and carries another 100,000 riders per day over its 39 routes, mostly in Nassau County.
The considerable smaller Suffolk County Transit system carries another 14,000 riders a day in Suffolk County. Travel by auto is the de rigeur on Long Island. Traffic congestion on Long Island long ago reached epic proportions; as early as the 1960s the Long Island Expressway was dubbed the world’s longest parking lot. Much of the traffic congestion problem can be ascribed to the patterns of land use in the two counties, densities high enough to generate large volumes of travel per square mile, but not high enough to warrant a robust transit network. Much of the problem can be traced to the growth that began in with the post World War II boom in Nassau County and has extended to much of Suffolk County; it was designed solely with the automobile in mind, with scant attention paid to accommodating the transit rider or pedestrian. Today, there is an average of 1.77 autos per household in Nassau County and .183 in Suffolk County; a scant 7.7 percent do not own a car in Nassau County and 5.4 percent in Suffolk County.
Against this backdrop this report addresses four transit related issues. First, it discusses the recent work done by the New York State Department of Transportation known as LITP 2000. At the core of LITP 2000’s recommendations is a network of widened highways that would be designed to accommodate a transit system of buses. This proposal has received a decidedly mixed reaction and this report raises a number of issues that call it into question. The report next turns to the matter of how to make the Long Island Rail Road a more effective means to carry people to jobs within the two counties, in contrast to its current prime role of bringing riders to jobs in New York City. The report pinpoints the greatest barrier to accomplishing this objective: the absence of a third track on a critical portion of the LIRR network, which prevents the operation of trains that could many more workers to their jobs by transit. Issues of connecting buses service and fare policies are also discussed. The third topic covered by this report deals with the precarious financial situation of the two local bus carriers which prevents them from expanding service to address gaps and respond to shifting demands. Suggestion for addressing this are made. Finally, this report lays out an approach for determining new land use patterns and densities that could be used to create more transit-oriented corridors on the Island. The Nassau Hub, the Route 110 Corridor, and Hicksville are used as prototypes for this work.
