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TIMESLEDGER | QNS.COM | MARCH 25 - MARCH 31, 2022
This Queens LIRR station didn’t get MTA’s $5 CityTicket promotion
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
For three weeks, straphangers have been
able to benefit from a $5 flat fare ticket to ride
the MTA’s two commuter railroads within
the city limits during off-peak hours under
the so-called CityTicket program — except
for one station in a working-class neighborhood
at the southeastern edge of Queens
where riders will still have to pay almost
twice that.
The Far Rockaway stop on the Long Island
Rail Road does not offer the discount,
because trains must go out of the city and
make stops through the Five Towns just over
the Nassau County border before returning
to Queens along the route, Metropolitan
Transportation Authority officials said.
“It’s literally the only railroad station
in the entire network, while it’s in the city,
travel to and from it requires going through
Nassau County,” said MTA deputy chief of
management and budget Mark Young during
a City Council Transportation Committee
hearing Wednesday.
The trains on the Far Rockaway branch
of the LIRR go through seven stations outside
of the New York City border before veering
back into Rosedale, Queens, and Young said
with CityTicket, Far Rock residents would
have to pay only $5 despite traveling a longer
distance than someone getting on at the next
stop in the suburbs shelling out the regular
$9.25 fare.
But the area’s Council member Selvana
Brooks-Powers — who also chairs the Transportation
Committee — pushed the agency
should still include the station.
“Far Rockaway is a part of New York City,
it is a part of the great borough of Queens,
and the people in Far Rockaway deserve to
have that option as well,” Brooks-Powers said
during the March 16 hearing. “They have to
take an A train ride into the city that takes
so long, it takes away time that they can be
really spending with family, getting a few extra
moments of sleep, to have a real balance
of quality of life — and because they live in
Far Rockaway, they should not be penalized
by not having that option.”
According to the latest U.S. Census data
for the area’s ZIP code, Far Rockaway is
nearly 44% Black, 24% Hispanic, and 24%
white, and the median household income is
$52,605, below $67,046 for the whole city.
The neighborhood is also at the last stop
on the A train subway line, which is a less
than 10-minute walk away from the LIRR
terminus.
An LIRR trip to Penn Station takes a little
under an hour, while an A train makes the
journey in about 66 minutes.
However, trips to other nabes in southeastern
Queens are a good bit faster with
the LIRR, such as 23 minutes to Rosedale as
opposed to 51 minutes via two bus lines, or
35 minutes to Jamaica Center compared to 1
hour 16 minutes on the subway or 48 minutes
on the bus.
MTA Chairperson and CEO Janno Lieber
told Schneps Media that the agency is looking
at giving the Queens commuters some
sort of benefit, even though offering the same
CityTicket deal is “not possible.”
“It is an anomaly. We very much respect
and want to provide benefits to Far Rock, and
what we’re doing is we’re looking at different
ways of giving them incentives that would
have real value, even if this one because of
that quirk … is not possible,” Lieber said during
an unrelated press conference at Grand
Central Terminal.
A Long Island Rail Road train. QNS file photo
/QNS.COM
