I love the Long Island Rail Road...NOT!

I live on Long Island and work in Manhattan. Since I'm not a total masochist, I choose to avoid driving into Manhattan. So I take the Long Island Rail Road, perhaps the world's most overpriced mode of transportation. I pay over $240 per month for a Rail Road and Subway pass. And there is talk that they are considering raising the fare on both the Rail Road and Subway. In 2003, I believe it was, they raised the Rail Road fare 25%. To be fair, they had not raised the fares for something like 8 or 10 years prior to the 2003 hike. Regardless, a 25% hike is pretty tough to bear. And I live in the closest "fare zone" on Long Island. There are people who live further out that actually pay more than I do, believe it or not.

I have a history of correspondence with the LIRR. As you can probably guess, most of that correspondence is not complementary. The vast majority of the trains that the Rail Road used up until about last year were 20-30 years old. They recently began purchasing and putting into service new cars, which are quite nice, truth be told. Since they have to conform to the Americans With Disabilities act, there are more spaces for wheelchairs and much larger (yay) bathrooms. Now these brand new trains with their spacious bathrooms have had problems. Most bathrooms are closed on the trains because the toilets get backed up quite easily. Gotta love that.

Today, my train home from work had door problems one stop away from my stop. At first the train workers tried to fix the problem. Delay. Then they told those of us in the last 2 cars to walk up and get back into the train further up, which we did, begrudgingly. Then, after waiting for about another 5 minutes, they determined that it made sense to take the train out of service, dumping several hundred people onto the platform. They told us to wait for the next train scheduled to stop at the station, which would be in another 10 minutes. Brilliant. So the several hundred of us were supposed to squeeze into what was likely an already crowded train. Who makes these decisions??!!

I am very much not looking forward to what will happen on both the Rail Road and the NYC Subway during the Republican convention. But I'll be sure to write about it, so if you have any interest, check back in a couple of weeks.