LIRR sees rise in late arrivals, biggest spike since '05

Long Island Rail Road trains arrived late more often in 2010 than in the first nine months of any year since 2005, according to agency figures.

Until this year, the LIRR had improved its on-time performance records for four straight January-September periods. In the first nine months of 2010, 92.4 percent of trains were on time. In 2009, 95.6 percent of all trains were on time in the same time frame.

The MTA considers a train late if it is tardy by 6 minutes or more.

LIRR president Helena Williams said the spike in late trains is largely attributable to several weather-related disruptions this year, Amtrak service problems near Penn Station, an increase in the number of train-track fatalities during peak travel times and a surge in LIRR stop signal violations early in the year.

Williams said the agency is "always working to reduce" the number of incidents that cause delays and to recover as quickly as possible when such an incident occurs.

"We recognize that on-time performance is our customers' number one priority. They want to get from point to point as quickly as possible with no delays," Williams said.

Last week, the LIRR posted on its website a list of every late or canceled train for the last three months. But those dates included a particularly bad week for the LIRR, when a signal fire in Jamaica virtually shut down the system for a day and delays stretched over the entire commuting week. Newsday analyzed on-time performance for the first nine months of 2010 and compared it with the same period dating back to 2005.

From July 1 and Sept. 28 of this year, nearly 5,700 trains were late or canceled - about 10 percent of all the trains the agency ran during that period.

Besides the Jamaica fire, LIRR officials also pointed out that over the three months included in the online list, the agency dealt with a weekend suspension of service in Suffolk because of Hurricane Earl and a September storm that halted service in and out of Penn Station for hours.

But Ira Greenberg, the LIRR Commuter's Council representative on the MTA Board, said even before those incidents, the increased frequency of delays has been obvious to customers this year.

"We've heard it - people saying that they think it's worse than it's been," said Greenberg, who is also the chairman of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. "When you publish a schedule, it's a promise. And when the schedule is not met, that promise is broken."

Greenberg said the agency's biggest obstacle to running trains on time is its limited capacity, which he said leads to a single problem on one train causing a "domino effect" throughout the system.

LIRR officials said they are constantly looking for ways to improve on-time performance, including tweaking schedules and gathering feedback from train crews. Williams said a plan to eventually add a second track in the single-track territory between Farmingdale and Ronkonkoma would also help minimize LIRR delays.

A spate of eight stop signal violations by train operators in the first five months of the year also caused significant delays, as federal law required those trains to be stopped and the entire crews to be replaced before finishing their runs. Williams said that, through increased monitoring and awareness, the LIRR has curtailed those violations in the second half of 2010.