The Long Island Rail Road is rolling out several new app features aimed at improving riders' experience in the wake of plenty of backlash sparked by further service cuts, which are being restored next week.
LIRR President Phil Eng says their Train Time app will now give riders information they need like exact passenger counts for every train car and updated audio announcements.
The app will also show where elevators, escalators and ramps are located at each station.
Riders without the app will also notice several changes at stations -- including new digital displays that use a color-coded system to show crowding conditions on every car in a train.
Eng says the new tech updates will help commuters have a better comfort level while riding the trains.
But with these upgrades coming, riders have complained for weeks about overcrowding on trains that came with additional schedules cuts. Those cuts are being reverted back to the previous timetable March 29.
What does reverting back mean in the instance? Eng explains.
"The schedule that we're going back to is the same level of service that we ran the Friday before March 8," he says. "It's approximately a little bit over 80% of our pre-pandemic train service."
As to why they couldn't go back to the previous schedule right away instead of on March 29, Eng says crew assignments and schedules were affected, and they had to change it to give the same level of service.