New subway gate rollout rigged with issues

Photo: AMNY

The NYC Subway's new fare gates- a pilot program which started being unveiled in December 2025 at a select couple of subway stations have recently been getting bad press after a 5 year old girls head got stuck in the fare gate at the Broadway-Lafeyette station. 

That wasn't the first time either that a situation similar to that happened with these new fare gates, as various kids had the gates closed on them, separating them from their caregivers and putting them in a potentially very scary situation for both the parent and child. 

Janno Lieber, in an interview conducted by PIX11 news, said that "the gates are being tested at select locations and that the officials are learning about them". He also said "the one thing I'm concerned about is making sure the parents know how to proceed safely through with a child", you got to have a child in front or close by to you; the system is designed to child, small person. What it’s not designed to do is if the child wanders behind, five feet behind you, then the doors close and that’s not great.”

The thing that bothers me about this whole situation is that it's 2026 and we are still having issues designing a fare gate, something that should be, in terms of the MTA's scale, relatively straightforward. While I understand it's not easy to test every little situation, like where a kid is a couple feet behind their parents, but in a world of modern technology, I can't imagine there isn't some sort of sensor they could implement that would be able to determine whether it's a young child behind their parents or person trying to get a free ride. 

I feel like this situation should represent a larger issue at the MTA- failing to perform adequate tests. The real problem lies in the timing for the gates; either you close them to early and it creates the potential for a situation where the gates would close on a child's face, but, if you keep them open for too long after the fare is paid, then it creates the potential for people to follow others behind and get a free ride. Similarly, I prefer the model of gates that isn't the tall one, as this will prevent the unlucky scenario where the gate would slam close right in your face-quite a good way to start your morning. However, this creates the potential for the more athletic crowd to simply turn into a hurdle and hop over it.

Photo: ABC7

 The fare gates are aimed to replace the current turnstyles at over 200 subway stations by 2029, in an attempt to crackdown on the cities fare evasion problem. Whether or not these new "fare gates" are going to make a difference is another question, one that can be debated given the fact that many say the MTA is making it "easier" for fare evasion by allowing people to potentially follow behind others through the gate. 

MNR fare hike in CT

MNR is once again raising fares, this time by 5% in Connecticut. This will bring the ticket price up a bit, from $16 for example, from Stamford to GCT, to $17. The fare hike separated in two parts, with the first one going into affect this past Labor Day, while the second round will go into effect next summer on July 1st. The reason behind the fare hikes is apparently due to increased ridership on the line, specifically between Stamford and New Haven which is causing funding gaps and to maintain the same lavish level of service provided, they must issue hikes. 

This move is on the contrary to the LIRR which instead of improving service when issuing fare hikes is instead cutting it.

The LIRR fare situation is worsening

The LIRR fare situation is getting out of control. It really is. The LIRR has now announced yet another fare hike, this one is for the entire agency. However, the LIRR is getting beaten by the stick the most, as, unlike their the New York City Transit and their sister railroad, Metro-North, which is actively trying to increase ridership through additional service, especially during the off-peak hours, the LIRR is trying to hurt it. 

Ridership

The affects of this impact ridership greatly. Generally speaking, the LIRR's ridership is increasing- to the point where it shattered post-pandemic ridership levels, as Kathy Hochul boasted at a press release. However, that doesn't mean ridership is booming all over the island as in fact, that is not the case. It's safe to say that ridership at LIRR stations located within New York City is growing, and that's mainly thanks to improved service and expansion of CityTicket to include peak hours bringing down the average fare from $6.37 in 2019 all the way down to $5.88 in 2024. That's a great thing. Bringing more people in NYC to the LIRR will greatly help reduce crowding on the already overcrowded subway lines, specifically the IRT Flushing Line and it will also help to reduce traffic on the cities way over congested roads, too. 

However, on Long Island, which should be the railroad's main focus, ridership hasn't even reached 3 quarters of what it once was. And while that's still partly due to the pandemic, it's also because of fares. The average fares for Long Island stations are up a whopping 10% from last year, raising what once was a $8.89 trip in 2019 and making it $9.73 in 2024. Ridership is failing short of pre-pandemic levels at all but 2 stations on Long Island, and with the exception of the South Fork, which is actually doing much better, thanks to SFCC, ridership just isn't going up.

The @mtalirr.bsky.social is pricing itself into irrelevance...We met up with a group of four who drove all the way into Manhattan. Even with garage parking ($20), two QMT tolls ($13.88), CBD Toll ($6) ($39.88 total)It was STILL third of the price of LIRR ($122) from zone 10. Will only get worse.

— The LIRR Today (@thelirrtoday.bsky.social) August 16, 2025 at 1:28 PM

And what's gonna make things even worse is the proposed fare hike for later in the year, which will further increase fares, and not only that, but it'll also shorten the validity period for one-way/round-trip tickets from 60 days to 4 hours! 

Less fares = more ridership

The answer is this: less fares = more ridership. It's that plain and simple. We've seen it over and over again. The largest driver of ridership is better fare incentives. The LIRR, right now, needs to focus it's efforts on developing a new fare system, one that's cheaper and more rational, one that promotes off-peak travel, not hurts it.

The LIRR is at the point where they either got to step-it-up, and deal with the fare situation, or watch as ridership plummets, as the railroad slowly declines into a shell of it's former self, something that's irrelevant, hard to use, and eventually, politically unsustainable.

The Tri-Rail funding situation

It's been a while since I've talked about Tri-Rail, south Florida's main and only commuter rail. Recently, despite growing ridership, Tri-Rail announced that it has numerous financial challenges due to insignificant amounts of funding (they only received 15 million from the state and were supposed to get 42 million) and that they may not be able to operate through mid-2027.

(Photo: Tri-Rail)

If Tri-Rail were to go bankrupt, then traffic in South Florida along the I-95 corridor would take a huge toll. They said that if all the ridership from Tri-Rail were to go onto the I-95, it would add "a lanes worth of traffic to the I-95 everyday". That's huge for an already congested highway, and forget about travelling during the holidays.

While Tri-Rail’s board is confident they’ll be able to solve the funding issues, time is running out to secure funding and essentially save the agency, which has currently had little time left. With time running out, now is the time to find a solution. Tri-Rail carries 4.4 million passengers annually, and it would be devastating to see it gone.

(Photo: David Larsen)

Late Friday Links 6/27

Happy Friday! I sure have been enjoying my first week without full school (half-days until Wed), and It's been a while since my last Late Friday Links as I've been very busy. It was difficult to find interesting things to cover in this Late Friday Links since a lot of the important news things this week had actual posts dedicated to them, but here's the things I could scrounge up:

• New LIRR Train Cars 60 Years Late 

Quite an interesting story showing 1968.

• MNR & LIRR Free Monthly Ticket Saturday Weekend Travel

In a nice move by the railroads, the MTA and LIRR are now allowing people to travel on Summer Saturdays for free. However, the LIRR snarkly (but understandingly) not including trains #6006, #6008, and #6010 in this, nor is train #902. 

• SEPTA Doomsday Cuts

And finally, while I don't typically talk about SEPTA, I think this is more than important enough to talk about. SEPTA will be receiving the "doomsday cuts" which will basically just rip the agency to pieces, cutting half the services, cutting the curfew to 9pm, slashing 2 major rail routes, while still adding a 21% fair increase. I at least hoped at the absolute minimum 

I'll be honest and say that SEPTA is a disaster. I've only ridden it once and it was a terrible experience. I absolutely hated it. I've never once wanted to get off public-transit as much as I did on that day when I was visiting Philly.

Anyways, guys, I hope you enjoyed today’s Late Friday Links!

2025 Ticket Sales Data

I think one of the most important pieces of data the LIRR can get is ridership patterns- it tells you where the most people are coming from and want to go so you can fine-tune your service to best meet everyone's needs. And while the data the LIRR gets (through the train-by-train ridership counts they refuse to give out for no good reason and the ticket sales data aren't perfect, they give a very good general idea of what the patterns look like).

I decided to anazlye the LIRR's ticket sales data, which I retrieved through a FOIL (Freedom of Law request). This data gives a general overview of ridership between two given stations, and when you put it all together it gives a general overview of the current ridership patterns.

I can't link the actual excel sheet I used to put together the tables, graphs due to it being too large, if you'd like to see that information, you can send me an email and I'll find a way to get it to you.

Station pairs

Shown on the top of the chart are the busiest station pairs in the system. Hicksville and Ronkonkoma tickets to NY-Penn Station continue to lead, however if intra-city travel continues to grow, I could see Hicksville being overtaken by Jamaica.

Surprisingly, this year, there were only two station pairs with over a million riders, mostly thanks to the effects of the pandemic. The average number of rides across all those were 4,356, and that’s about how many rides was taken between Port Jefferson and Stony Brook. Out of the pairs ticketed, Riverhead-Merllion Avenue and Yaphank-New Hyde Padk were ranked lowest at only one ticket. Not surprising.

Highest intra-island pairs

This included ticket-pairs that were to/from two stations that aren't city terminals (NYK, GCT, KGN, FHL, WDD, HPA, LIC, JAM, NAV, ENY, ATL). 

The top of the chart was almost entirely dominated by intra-island travel among Port Washington Branch stations, and that's a good thing considering it's easy to add intra-island stops on the two-tracked Port Washington Branch! For the most part, the rest of them were rather expected.

I was planning on including more information and information about the ticket types, however, this post took a long time to make since I had to plug all the information in to make the charts, compile the information, not to mention I'm still waiting for the FOIL request to comeback, therefore it would be much harder to compile the rest of the information, therefore, I decided to just skip out on the rest, this post took much longer than it was supposed to make, but I think this gives you a good idea of how things are going.

You Can Purchase A LIRR Ticket To Yankee Stadium

Let’s pretend some guy came up to you and asked you “if you can purchase an LIRR ticket to Yankee Stadium”, what would your response to him be?

For many of you it would probably be no, however the answer is actually yes. If you were to wander up to an LIRR ticket vending machine, if you search “Y”, the option next to Yaphank would be Yankee Stadium.

Photo: The LIRR Today

Now as you must know, the LIRR hasn’t and probably never will operate trains to and from Yankee Stadium, but they included that as a convenience to riders going to/from that station. Basically, from what I’ve seen, the LIRR does or at least did designate “The Train to The Game” route as taking the LIRR to 34 St-Penn Station, then walking to 6th Avenue, and taking a Bronx-bound (D) up Central Park West to 161 St- Yankee Stadium. The nice bonus is that this gives you a ticket, allowing you to skip using a crummy Metrocard Machine.

Since East Side Access, it’s even less useful since you can just take the LIRR to Grand Central and connect to Metro-North there, and now that they are unfortunately phasing out Metrocards to OMNY, I don’t know what will be of this little-known feature. I’m not even confident it exists anymore on the ticket machine to be totally honest.

I personally can’t tell you what it says on the ticket, since I’ve never purchased a ticket there and probably never will. I tried looking it up but their doesn’t seam to be any photos of the ticket online and I’m too lazy to go up to my local station and buy one.

In conclusion, it’s another useless little Easter egg that little know about due to it being hidden away with Yaphank (a station, again, few search for), but next time your going to take the LIRR and connect to the subway, try the Yankee Stadium option and see if it raises any eyebrows!