It's a helluva start
Already sick after Day-1 crush hour
It’s here — and it’s pretty hellish. Long Island Rail Road and NJ Transit commuters packed into trains and navigated cramped platforms Monday as they settled in for a long, hot summer of woes as track repairs started at Penn Station.
“I was sitting on the [LIRR], and I had so much anxiety — I felt like my stomach was going to fall out,” Janette Schneider, 40, who commutes from Deer Park, LI, to Manhattan, said of the morning crowds.
Many riders heeded the MTA’s advice, skipping out on extra sleep to make more time for their rides into the city.
“I left for work 30 minutes earlier and the train was on time,” said Jill Altit, 32, who commutes from New Brunswick, NJ.
“Looks like I’ll be waking up 30 minutes earlier and leaving for work 30 minutes earlier every morning until who knows.”
Commuters will be feeling the pain until at least Sept. 1, when repairs to Penn Station’s aging tracks are expected to be completed.
More repairs to the power and signal systems will have to be performed at a later date.
Gov. Cuomo wasn’t so optimistic about the two-month timeline, telling NY1 on Monday he’s “dubious” the track work will be done by then.
That’s not great news for riders, who complained about their trains being jammed with standingroom-only cars.
“I wasn’t able to get a seat,” griped Kate McMillan, 64, who travels into the city from Plainfield, NJ. “I wish they would just get [the repairs] done quickly.”
Despite the uncomfortable commute, MTA Chairman Joe Lhota said the system “worked really well.”
But it looks like one of the MTA’s contingency plans — free ferry service as an alternative to trains — wasn’t exactly a hot seller.
While there were plenty of shuttle buses to take commuters to the ferries — so many that cars had to be towed near the LIRR’s Hunters- point Avenue station in Queens to make room for them — one MTA worker said most ferries that left from there had only a handful of people on them.
“The buses were not used as much as we thought, the ferries were not used as much as we thought, but that’s only one day,” Lhota said.
He also urged riders to take a ferry or subway into Manhattan from Hunters Point instead of getting on the E train in Jamaica.