Missing Rider Numbers And Crowding Concerns

Reading last week’s story about the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee, we were struck by a brief mention of that hamlet’s train station and the vehicle congestion during high-season weekend arrival and departure times. Things are not much better at East Hampton’s Long Island Rail Road stop and a whole lot worse at the Bridgehampton site, where the chaos even on a recent August weekday morning was truly beyond belief. But traffic problems may be the least of the railroad’s worries as a federal agency has begun to look at onboard safety on Hamptons-bound trains.

Underscoring concerns about the Montauk branch nearing a breaking point, the Federal Railroad Administration this week met with the L.I.R.R.’s operations head to discuss overcrowding. A railroad spokesman said that the question of passengers sitting on luggage in the aisles on the Cannonball, a Friday express from New York City, was added to the agenda of a previously scheduled meeting. The feds are concerned that too many passengers and all their weekend baggage might hinder an evacuation between cars in the event of an emergency.

Notably, the spokesman said, the L.I.R.R. does not have a maximum per-car occupancy limit nor was it able to say how many people exactly pile onto each train. The L.I.R.R. has not tallied up the use of its various stations more than once or twice a decade. Think of it: Thousands of riders, but the railroad cannot say how many. It’s laughable, to be generous; dangerously incompetent otherwise.

There is, of course, the distinct possibility that someone in the bowels of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority does know exactly how many tickets were issued in a given period to, say, Montauk, but if so, he or she is not telling the press office. On the other hand, maybe not. What can be inferred is that the policy makers and the people who create the schedules are doing so in an information vacuum — and that goes as well for the people who design our hamlet and village train stations and are in charge of their surrounding traffic patterns, and more important, onboard safety.

Anyone who has been in one of these vehicle scrums or a packed Friday train car can attest to the problem. What is astounding is that no one in a position to do something about it is keeping track even in the most minimal fashion — accurate passenger counts. At this point, moving the Amagansett L.I.R.R. station to another site, as suggested, might be a good idea, but until there are real numbers about its use, advocating for it can only be speculation. However, it is more than obvious that the railroad must move swiftly to improve weekender service on the Montauk branch.