By Hank Russell
A report from the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) showed that overall usage of public transportation on Long Island was up from the previous year, while vehicular traffic on local bridges was down.
NYMTC’s Travel Patterns summarizes, annually and by each quarter of the year, the average weekday ridership on buses, rail, subways, and ferries along with the vehicular traffic crossing waterway bridges in the NYMTC planning area.
In measuring ridership aboard the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), the NYMTC found that, during the fourth quarter of 2023, the average number of passengers was 241,454. That was a 19.2% increase during the same three months of the previous year.
When broken down by month, 235,077 riders took the LIRR in October 2023, which is up 14.5% from October 2022. In November 2023, it hit a quarterly peak of 247,035 riders — an improvement of 18.8% over the previous November. Ridership fell the following month to 242,249 in December 2023; however, that is a 24.7% increase over the December from the previous year.
On the bus lines, the NYMTC saw an average of 66,445 passengers on the Nassau Inter-County Express (NICE) buses during the last three months of 2023, an increase of 7.8% over the same time period in 2022. There were 69,471 passengers in October 2023, but that number dropped to 67,093 in November 2023 and again to 62,772 in December 2023.
From October to December 2023, Suffolk County Buses averaged 13,398 passengers, which was up 11.8% from Q4 2022, according to the NYMTC. In October 2023, the number was 13,622; however, in November 2023, ridership fell to 13,252 before it inched back up to 13,321 in December 2023.
The only anomaly was the City of Long Beach bus system, averaging 481 passengers from October-December 2023, the NYMTC said. It is a drop of 1.4% from the previous quarter. Like NICE, Long Beach saw a monthly decline in ridership, from 488 in October 2023, to 479 to November 2023 and again to 476 in December 2023.
On the bridges, 13,352 vehicles traveled over the Atlantic Beach Bridge in October 2023, but that number declined towards the end of the year, with only 12,846 in November 2023 and 12,126 in December 2023. The numbers for the fourth quarter of 2022 averaged out to 12,775 vehicles. That is a 3.3% decrease compared to the last three months of 2022.
The NYMTC is a regional council of governments that is the Metropolitan Planning Organization for New York City, Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley. The organization provides a collaborative planning forum to address transportation-related issues, develop regional plans and make decisions on the use of federal transportation funds for its planning area, which covers 2,440 square miles.
“One of the many uses Travel Patterns has for us, our members, and the public is that it allows us to track route usage in our area and anticipate future needs for funding,” said Adam S. Levine, the executive director of NYMTC. “This is key since anyone taking public transportation in the New York metropolitan area can see that it is on its way to returning to pre-Covid levels.”