Hardly end of the line for railroads

It’s recently become popular opinion to write the epitaph (Jan. 20 CT Mirror opinion, “The elephant in the Metro-North station”) of railroad travel as we know it, with some questioning (Dec. 27 Jim Cameron column, “MetroNorth commuters are not coming back”), whether ridership will ever return to pre-pandemic levels.

Forecasts of the railroad’s future irrelevancy are almost as old as the railroad itself. A century ago, the marvelous telephone was going to end the need for offices. Then, for a time, the promise of the automobile made big transit-reliant cities feel like an anachronism. The flight of Fortune 500 companies was supposed to be an early phase of the end of New York, but instead that led the city to flourish with even greater economic diversification. Articles following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, predicted highrise living would come to an end, but two decades later New York’s towers are rising higher than ever.

Today, with a pandemic in full view, naysayers are again asking: Will riders come back to the trains? If they don’t, then what?

At Metro-North, we’re bullish. For us, it’s not a matter of “if” ridership comes back, it’s a matter of “when.”

Many factors will affect ridership recovery, notably the timing of the end of the pandemic, the future of office work (for those who have the type of job where working remotely is possible), commuters’ shifts between rail and road, the degree of discretionary travel, and the overall recovery of the region’s economy.

Metro-North monitors these trends carefully all the time to be able to adjust our service levels. The railroad has been operating at 63 percent of its pre-COVID service level since July, and we have no plans to change that level of service any time soon.

Companies may be leveraging new technology to allow more remote work, but that would have happened gradually without the pandemic, and every company that opts to reduce its real estate footprint opens up an opportunity for companies that had been priced out to gain a foothold in the most vibrant region in the United States, giving the region a more diverse, more resilient set of employers.

But let’s take a step back to look at the bigger picture. Metro-North broke its all-time ridership records for 10 straight years from 2010 through 2019, when it reached 86.6 million. We have seen a steady increase in ridership since the railroad was founded in 1983, doubling our initial ridership in 2015. Over the 30 years before the pandemic, ridership increased every year except just three: 1991, 2003 and 2009.

The fuel for this growth hasn’t come from the traditional nine-to-five suburb-to-Manhattan peak-hour commute that is the focus of concerns about the future of office work. Rather, it’s been fueled by an evolving mix of riders traveling to different places at different times for different reasons. Reversepeak and discretionary trips, and travel between stations other than Grand Central have long been Metro-North’s strength, and years ago relegated the traditional commute to less than 50 percent of our ridership.

From 1989 through 2019: Commutation ridership to Manhattan — as measured by customers using monthly or weekly tickets — increased by 21 percent. But ridership between other stations — fueled by New York City residents traveling outbound for jobs — increased by 131 percent. And leisure and discretionary ridership increased by 93 percent. Those markets are less likely to be impacted by the pandemic, pointing to further growth in the years ahead.

If there is to be a long-term reduction in peak demand, it comes with a silver lining: A smoother curve of service that’s spread more evenly throughout the day is less costly to provide than a similar number of trains that are heavily weighted toward a morning and evening rush hours. This can dampen the potential economic impact of the virus.

The bigger crisis for the railroad happened generations ago, when people predicted the automobile and highways would spell the end of railroading and dense urban centers. But New York and Connecticut pushed back, establishing the MTA and MetroNorth and systematizing capital improvement programs to ensure stability in investments in public transportation. Then a funny thing happened: For its first 37 years, MetroNorth ridership relentlessly increased, with just occasional short-lived downturns associated with economic recessions. There’s no reason to think that Metro-North’s ridership won’t recover significantly once this anomaly has passed.