MTA Long Island Rail Road
MTA Long Island Rail Road carried 97,220,517 boardings in FY2024 at $22.76 per ride and $16.08 in subsidy per ride. Ten years of NTD data, by mode.
What those two numbers mean
Passengers aboard is passenger miles divided by vehicle miles: how many people are on board on average, at any moment. It is the missing term in cost per ride. A service carrying twenty people per vehicle mile and one carrying half a person can spend the same on fuel and wages and arrive at wildly different costs per passenger.
Average speed is vehicle miles divided by vehicle hours, including every stop and every red light. It is the hidden term in cost per mile, because cost per mile is cost per hour divided by speed. A bus network slowing from 13 mph to 11 becomes a fifth more expensive per mile with no change in wages and no change in service.
Profile
Agency profile
As filed with the National Transit Database.
Contact
- Legal name
- MTA Long Island Rail Road
- Address
-
2 Broadway
New York, NY 10004 - Website
- http://www.mta.info/lirr
Organization
- Organization type
- Subsidiary Unit of a Transit Agency, Reporting Separately
- Reporter type
- Full Reporter
- Fiscal year ends
- December 31, 2024
- Reporting since
- FY2015
Service area
- Population served
- 11,170,342 over 2,967 sq mi
- Density
- 3,765 people per sq mi
- Urbanized area
- New York--Jersey City--Newark, NY--NJ · 19.4M people
- Vehicles at maximum service
- 1,082
Services operated
Each mode has its own page, with its own ridership, cost and safety.
Ridership
Ridership
MTA Long Island Rail Road reports annually. NTD publishes monthly figures for full reporters only.
Monthly boardings
NTD publishes monthly figures for full reporters only. This agency reports annually, so its ridership appears in the yearly chart alongside.
Annual boardings
Ten-year series
Cost
Cost and subsidy
Dollar figures are shown as reported and again in current dollars.
Cost and subsidy per ride
As reported
In 2024 dollars
The same series with inflation removed
Why cost per ride moved
Indexed to FY2015 = 100
Cost per ride is the cost of an hour of service divided by the riders carried in that hour. It can only rise for two reasons: service got dearer to produce, or fewer people rode it.
Since FY2015 an hour of service costs +40.4% more to run, while carrying -19.3% as many riders. Most of the rise in cost per ride is the service itself getting dearer.
Where the money goes
Operating cost by function
Who pays for it
Federal, state and local funding, 1991 to 2024
Operating and capital money together, in the dollars of each year. Fares are not in this file — FTA took them out of the funding series in 2022 — so "directly generated" here means advertising, concessions, park and ride and taxes the agency levies itself. The farebox is charted above.
Capital
Capital spending
What was spent on building, rebuilding and replacing, shown beside the cost of running the service rather than folded into it.
Capital spending since 1992
In 2024 dollars, so the years can be compared. This is the series the estimate above is built from.
Operating and capital, per ride
Stacked, but counted separately. The two are different kinds of number.
Building, or keeping what exists
FY2024. NTD records which of the two every dollar was reported under.
Who pays for what
FY2024. Running the service and building it are funded by different governments.
| Total | Federal | State | Local | Fares and own revenue | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| operating | $2.4B | 0% | 56.1% | 8.6% | 35.2% |
| capital | $938.6M | 31% | 19.5% | 35.9% | 13.6% |
Fares offset the cost of running the service. They do not meaningfully offset capital, which is why subsidy per ride on this site is an operating figure and stays one.
What these capital figures are not
- Spending is not the same as cost
- NTD reports what an agency spent on capital in a year, not what its capital cost it that year. Those differ: a system opened in 1904 spends almost nothing on tunnels while consuming an enormous inherited asset every day, and an agency that bought a fleet last year spent a fortune once and will spend nothing for a decade.
- Vehicles can be depreciated. Everything else cannot.
- FTA's capital series runs from 1992, which covers a bus fleet's working life more than twice over, so averaging rolling-stock spending across one replacement cycle gives a defensible figure for what the fleet costs each year. Track, tunnels, bridges and stations last forty to a hundred years or more. Thirty-three years of spending on those measures recent investment policy, not consumption, so no figure is published for them.
- The vehicle figure is an estimate
- Cost per ride including vehicles is arithmetic on published spending rather than a published number, and it assumes the agency has been replacing vehicles at roughly the rate it wears them out. Each agency's page says how far that assumption holds for it. It covers vehicles only: no track, no tunnels, no stations.
- Year-by-year capital is lumpy
- Capital arrives in bursts. A single year of it says more about where an agency sits in its replacement cycle than about the cost of carrying a passenger, which is why the per-ride averages here run across every year available.
- Fares do not pay for it
- Fare revenue offsets operating cost. It does not meaningfully offset capital, which is funded almost entirely by government. Subsidy per ride on this site is an operating figure and stays that way.
Capital spending by year and use
| Year | Guideway | Stations | Vehicles | Maintenance buildings | Fare collection | Other | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | $465M | $247.7M | $49.3M | $74.7M | $0 | $5.8M | $938.6M |
| 2023 | $567.2M | $216.9M | $94.1M | $58.4M | $0 | $6.8M | $1.07B |
| 2022 | $665.6M | $283.3M | $67.2M | $28.3M | $0 | $3.02M | $1.11B |
Peers
Compared with similar systems
1 agencies serve an urbanized area of similar size, carry a similar number of riders, and run commuter rail as their main service.
Cost per ride against peers
This agency in blue, peer median dashed
Rides per resident against peers
How much the place uses what it has
Peer detail
| Agency | Urbanized area | Population | Boardings | Rides / resident | Cost / ride | Subsidy / ride | Fare recovery |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MTA Long Island Rail Road this agency | New York--Jersey City--Newark, NY--NJ | 19.4M | 97.2M | 8.7 | $22.76 | $16.08 | 29.4% |
| New York--Jersey City--Newark, NY--NJ | 19.4M | 74.4M | 11.44 | $23.03 | $14.62 | 36.5% | |
| Peer median (1 agencies) | 11.44 | $23.03 | $14.62 | 36.5% | |||
By mode
By mode
Each service this agency runs, for FY2024. Directly operated and purchased service are summed.
Boardings by mode
Annual, stacked
Cost per ride by mode
FY2024
Mode detail, FY2024
| Mode | Service | Boardings | Passenger miles | Revenue hours | Operating cost | Cost / ride | Subsidy / ride | Fare recovery | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commuter Rail | Directly operated | 97,220,517 | 2,499,870,247 | 2,600,595 | $2,212,613,620 | $22.76 | $16.08 | 29.4% | Detail → |
Safety
Safety
Collisions, fires, derailments and security events reported to NTD. Only complete years are shown.
Safety
Safety and security events are published in the monthly file, which covers full reporters only. This agency does not appear in it.
Fleet
Fleet, workforce and reliability
How old the vehicles are, how many people run them, and how far they get between breakdowns. NTD publishes all three from 2022 onward.
Workforce by mode
| Mode | Service | Hours | Operators | Vehicle maintenance | Administration | All staff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commuter Rail | Directly operated | Full Time | 3,270 | 2,156 | 746 | 8,948 |
| Commuter Rail | Directly operated | Part Time | — | — | 0 | 0 |
How the fleet has aged, 1992 to 2024
Average vehicle age, weighted across every mode the agency runs
A rising line is not automatically bad and a falling one is not automatically good: a fleet gets younger the year an agency takes delivery, and older every year it does not. What the shape shows is whether replacement is steady or comes in bursts. The table below says how many vehicles are actually past the life FTA expects of them.
Vehicles, and how many are accessible
Active revenue vehicles against those meeting the ADA standard
Fleet age
FTA's default useful life benchmark for each class, from the Transit Asset Management rule
| Vehicle type | Count | Average age | FTA benchmark | Past FTA benchmark | Past own benchmark |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commuter Rail Self-Propelled Passenger Car | 1,094 | 17.91 yrs | 39 yrs |
|
|
| Commuter Rail Passenger Coach | 134 | 25.55 yrs | 39 yrs |
|
|
| Commuter Rail Locomotive | 44 | 25.52 yrs | 39 yrs |
|
Miles between failures
Revenue miles divided by mechanical failures. Higher is better.
NTD counts a failure as major when it stops the vehicle finishing its trip.
Reliability by mode
| Mode | Service | Revenue miles | Major failures | All failures | Miles between failures |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commuter Rail | Directly operated | 78,229,282 | 209 | 224 | 349,238 |
Fuel and energy
What the fleet burned in FY2024.
Miles by fuel
Comparing miles avoids any energy-equivalence assumption
Fuel by mode
| Mode | Diesel (gal) | Gasoline (gal) | CNG (gal eq.) | Electric (kWh) | Diesel mpg | Zero-emission |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commuter Rail | 7,099,836 | — | — | 592,451,600 | 0.14 | 98.7% |
All years
Full annual series
Every year this agency reported, as published.
| Year | Boardings | Passenger miles | Revenue miles | Revenue hours | Operating cost | Fares | Cost / ride | Subsidy / ride | Fare recovery |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 97,220,517 | 2,499,870,247 | 78,229,282 | 2,600,595 | $2,212,613,620 | $649,735,327 | $22.76 | $16.08 | 29.4% |
| 2023 | 83,835,706 | 2,033,685,836 | 76,530,483 | 2,518,310 | $2,135,218,700 | $568,950,760 | $25.47 | $18.68 | 26.6% |
| 2022 | 81,613,697 | 1,820,711,614 | 62,918,402 | 2,107,155 | $1,601,947,259 | $457,582,502 | $19.63 | $14.02 | 28.6% |
| 2021 | 49,167,557 | 1,420,978,562 | 58,398,960 | 2,088,960 | $1,471,241,336 | $295,754,559 | $29.92 | $23.91 | 20.1% |
| 2020 | 43,484,907 | 1,229,284,540 | 61,766,650 | 2,114,409 | $1,464,445,571 | $272,532,791 | $33.68 | $27.41 | 18.6% |
| 2019 | 114,241,364 | 3,929,859,957 | 67,942,021 | 2,207,645 | $1,507,026,548 | $768,917,681 | $13.19 | $6.46 | 51% |
| 2018 | 105,538,101 | 3,405,961,936 | 66,508,822 | 2,098,218 | $1,482,474,624 | $740,646,842 | $14.05 | $7.03 | 50% |
| 2017 | 103,630,405 | 2,996,872,220 | 67,046,480 | 2,125,167 | $1,361,952,328 | $732,987,655 | $13.14 | $6.07 | 53.8% |
| 2016 | 103,196,857 | 2,154,354,158 | 66,763,465 | 2,175,341 | $1,309,290,914 | $719,213,774 | $12.69 | $5.72 | 54.9% |
| 2015 | 98,699,512 | 2,220,654,580 | 67,522,769 | 2,129,688 | $1,290,583,961 | $700,684,859 | $13.08 | $5.98 | 54.3% |