Since it was first chartered in 1834, the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) has been central to the growth and development of Long Island. The LIRR was the core of a rail-oriented transportation network that connected growing communities to jobs in both Manhattan and Long Island in the century between the Civil War and World War II. As a car-dominated culture pulled jobs and people farther from the railroad, the LIRR fell into disrepair in the 1940s and 1950s. In the last 30 years, the LIRR network has been revived and improved with billions of dollars invested in new cars, upgraded systems and repairs to tracks, stations and rail yards. Long Island’s economy and way of life would be impossible without the railroad, and many of its impacts are not widely recognized.
One out of every four dollars of income earned by Long Island residents is brought home from jobs in New York City. In 2011, this constituted $26 billion in income -- 34% of all income earned by Nassau residents and 14% of income earned by Suffolk residents.
30% of employed Nassau residents and 11% of employed Suffolk residents commute to New York City for work, and a third of them take the LIRR.
Auto traffic would congeal on highways as it would require 10 new traffic lanes to carry the daily equivalent of LIRR riders into Penn Station.
Yet the reach and capacity of the railroad has remained unchanged since it first connected to Manhattan’s Penn Station in 1910. While the other commuter railroads in the New York region—Metro-North and New Jersey Transit— have greatly increased ridership in the last two decades with new services, LIRR ridership has hardly budged. Now, for the first time in in more than a century, the LIRR is poised to provide new capacity on its network. With this new capacity, the railroad could lead a new era of economic growth for Long Island. By 2019, the East Side Access (ESA) project will give LIRR riders direct access to Grand Central Terminal and east Midtown Manhattan, the densest concentration of jobs in the country. Track capacity is also being expanded on the island itself. A second track from Farmingdale to Ronkonkoma could be completed by 2018 and expand service options and reliability on one of the fastest growing yet most overcrowded lines in the system. Beyond these two projects, a deferred and long-debated project—a third track on the LIRR Main Line—has the potential to greatly improve service and support job growth within Nassau and Suffolk. East Side Access will bring both immediate and long-term benefits to everyone on Long Island, not just LIRR riders:
Nassau and Suffolk residents would have improved access to 560,000 jobs in Manhattan, where the median wage is more than twice as high as on Long Island. These higher incomes will help support local businesses on the island.
Thousands of commuters will save an average of 18 minutes and as many as 42 minutes a day taking the train to Grand Central instead of Penn Station.
400,000 homeowners in Nassau and Suffolk will see the value of their homes rise by an average of $7,300.
With three tunnels into two terminals, rather than two tunnels into one location, service into Manhattan will be more reliable and less vulnerable to storms, terrorism or breakdowns.
LIRR riders will be able to board Metro-North trains in the same terminal at Grand Central.
The system will have the capacity to add more service at a later date.
There will be more commuters with higher incomes that will support local businesses.
Highway congestion and air pollution will be reduced
Doubling the track capacity to Ronkonkoma will greatly improve service reliability and support needed housing and jobs in the heart of Long Island. Three transit-oriented development (TOD) projects, currently in the planning stages, would benefit from this improved service. A joint project by the towns of Brookhaven and Islip would create a new transit hub at Ronkonkoma, including improved connections to MacArthur Airport, which could create an estimated 11,000 jobs. Wyandanch Rising, an initiative by the Town of Babylon, would generate housing, employment and opportunity for Suffolk’s poorest community. The full Double Track project also includes a new station at Republic Airport as part of a plan to create a transit-oriented mixeduse hub around the station.
These improvements will bring more income and wealth into Long Island and tie it more closely with the dynamic regional economy anchored by Manhattan’s central business district. They will also unlock the potential for a much more robust and transit-oriented economy on Long Island. To reach this potential, however, Long Island will need to take additional measures. Municipalities, supported by federal, state and regional actions, will need to adopt land use and economic development policies that will create jobs and housing around the transit network. These will need to include funding for sewers and other critical infrastructure. To capture the benefits created by the 2nd track to Ronkonkoma, the mixed-use projects planned for Ronkonkoma, Wyandanch and Republic will need to be implemented. East Side Access will make Long Island more attractive as a place to live, but to provide enough housing to accommodate both younger and older residents, downtowns and station areas will need to be zoned to create more rental housing and condominiums.
The potential is there, as documented in the 2010 Long Island Index estimates that 90,000 additional homes could be built in a mix of townhouses, garden apartments and mid-rise apartment buildings in downtowns and around the LIRR stations. In addition to new land use and infrastructure policies, the value of East Side Access and a second track to Ronkonkoma would be even greater with a third track on the LIRR Main Line. The increased capacity from East Side Access and the Double Track to Ronkonkoma will create new service and attract more riders to the railroad, making Long Island a more attractive place to live and do business. However, additional service and economic possibilities will be unlocked only if the LIRR’s central artery has the capacity to handle larger volumes of trains and provide frequent twoway service. A third track would not only improve service reliability and frequency. It would also create a new dynamic that would facilitate intra-Island travel by rail. Two-way, peak period travel would support job growth on Long Island by allowing more workers to reach employers in Nassau and Suffolk. There would be more incentive to both live and work in Long Island’s downtowns. Long Island’s economy would have a flexibility that it currently lacks to respond to changes in employer and worker preferences, an advantage that is hard to quantify but important in a changing global economy. The Long Island Rail Road would similarly have the flexibility to shift service to wherever demand is greatest. More specifically, the third track would accomplish the following:
Service reliability, efficiency and flexibility would be greatly improved, with 50% more capacity on the Main Line to reroute trains, move trains more easily between yards and stations, and add service as needed.
Employers will have access to many more potential workers, including a minimum of 350,000 for Mineola and 226,000 for Hicksville, for example, increasing the attractiveness of Long Island to prospective employers.
Major economic development initiatives, including Wyandanch Rising, the Ronkonkoma-MacArthur Transit Hub and a Republic Airport Hub, would have an even greater chance of success.
Travel within Long Island would be more transit-oriented, both on the LIRR and along bus routes feeding into it.
Highway congestion and air pollution would be reduced to a greater degree.
Projects of this magnitude necessarily come with costs and challenges. The combined construction cost of the three projects is over $10 billion. East Side Access, with a cost of over $8 billion, represents the lion’s share of the capital costs. Increased service will mean increased parking at some stations, and could mean longer delays at grade crossings. A third track on the Main Line would reconstruct six stations and possibly a number of rail crossings, and would require the use of small sections of privately owned properties. For East Side Access, the challenge is to complete the remaining construction, which includes the most complicated part of the project, on schedule. Local communities and the LIRR will also need to plan for changes in parking needs and traffic patterns. Funding to complete the second track to Ronkonkoma will need to be included in the next MTA capital plan. Economic development plans around stations in the corridor would ideally advance in parallel with construction of the track to maximize the economic return on investment. As these two projects proceed, environmental and engineering studies for the third track on the Main Line should be completed to have a fully informed public discussion about its benefits and impacts.
This dialogue should engage communities with professionally led workshops that would dispel any misinformation and identify ways that residents and businesses could capitalize on new service as well as minimize negative impacts. But the calculus should not stop with these direct costs and benefits. History and research from regions around the country have demonstrated that investments in transit capacity can yield economic returns that are worth several times the initial investment. The real potential of an expanded, more reliable and more efficient Long Island Rail Road is to anchor a 21st century economy that is neither the rail-centric reality of a century ago nor the auto-dependent culture of today. Rather, it would be a Long Island with greater flexibility and choice—more job choices, more housing choices and more choices on how to travel. Single-family, suburban neighborhoods would still be the norm, and most trips would still be made by car.
But there would be more jobs and housing in downtowns clustered around train stations, and more options for taking a train or bus, not only to get into Manhattan but to get around to shopping centers, offices, hospitals, universities and parks. Long Island would regain an economic edge that it has lost in a world where both demographics and employer requirements are increasingly favoring places with more walkable, mixed-use centers that are served by a well-functioning transit system. Achieving this potential will require far more than an improved Long Island Rail Road. Complementary land use regulations, development policies and investments in sewers and other infrastructure are needed. Long Island has already started down this road with a range of efforts ranging from new village master plans to the island-wide Regional Economic Development Council plan. Many high priority economic development projects are directly related to the new LIRR investments.
Others, such as Accelerate Long Island’s strategy for research-oriented economic development, require new transit-oriented housing and services to attract the innovative brain power needed to be successful. All of these ambitious efforts will require substantial resources and sustained political will. A new Long Island Rail Road can be the physical armature that binds these efforts together.
