I Have Some Suggestions for You LIRR!

I understand Long Island Rail Road.  You operate a complex system responsible for getting hundreds of thousands of people between New York City and Long Island every day.  A moment of half-hearted research in the interest of factuality in this blog tells me it's about 300,000 people a day.  So I get that it may not be easy.  But quite frankly you've also been doing it for almost 200 years (again research!) and after all this time, you would think you would be pretty good at it.   Yet you've got pretty low confidence ratings from your customers, who probably believe that you don't care much about making major efforts to improve because hey, how else are they going to get into Manhattan every day?  Full disclosure - I am a daily commuter who pretty much does believe that.

However, being a generous person I have decided to give you some tips that might help you look just a wee bit better.  Please note these are not intended to solve all of your problems or to even turn you into a moderately okay train system that comes close to being worth the exorbitant prices you charge to get in and out of the city.  They might however minimize the number of people who at a given moment are collectively thinking that you are populated by idiots.

• When the train comes to a stop in the station, open the doors.  Seems simple but it's just simply astonishing how often you can't seem to do it.  When us passengers are on the train waiting to get out at our stop (be it Penn Station or home), it's mildly annoying and garners some head shakes and mumbles over your bumbling behavior.  When we are on an elevated platform that is a frigid wind tunnel in the arctic cold of February at 7:00 in the morning, our hearts freeze and we harbor thoughts of dark vengeance against you and your spawn. It all contributes to an overall aura of thinking you suck.  Just open the damn doors.

• When the train is crowded, tell the bag on the seat people to move their bags so people can sit (have a read to see what I think about them).  And, no the little announcement you make during the train ride about being courteous to fellow passengers doesn't count.  I mean if you are walking through a crowded train where people are standing, as you come to people who have their bags on a seat, do us all a favor and tell them to their face right then and there to move their bag so their fellow passengers can sit.   I have been riding the LIRR for about 25 years and not once in all that time, no matter how crowded the train and no matter how many people still have their bags on the seats, have I ever heard an LIRR conductor say "the train is crowded you're going to have to move your bag" and that contributes to the overall aura of thinking you suck.  Just start saying it and you will immediately get points in the positive column.    

• Use the air conditioning when it is hot out and the heat when it is cold out.  When it is unseasonably cool and pouring rain outside at the beginning of September I don't want to get into a train car that is about 55 degrees.  Similarly, I expect that if the temperature strangely soars to 70 degrees on a day in March you can adjust the thermostat so the heat isn't blasting.  These things might even save you some money so you don't have to increase my ticket cost every year.  And again, there's that contributing to an overall aura of thinking you suck.

• Give some purpose to the fact that you make the monthly ticket a different color every month.  If my peach colored ticket happens to slide down into my front purse pocket a little bit and you can’t quite read the November on it, why do you need to wake me to pull it out further?  It’s peach!  Last month it was light green and the month before that it was powder blue and the month before it was some other highly identifiable pastel that is completely different from the prior month.   If you can’t tell it’s the right ticket by the color – if after seeing that exact same color on the previous 200 hundred tickets you just checked you still have to wake me because you can’t see the NOV - then why don’t you just make them all the same color?  Waking passengers from their nap because you can’t use your own color coded system contributes to the overall aura of thinking you suck.

Just four little things LIRR. A bar so low even you might be able to crawl over it and look like you suck a little less.