Metro North to Resume by Noon: Cuomo Holds Tuesday AM Briefing

Written by Lanning Taliaferro (Patch Staff)

Metro North will be running on a Sunday schedule by noon, New York state officials say.

At an 8 a.m. press briefing, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and officials including the heads of the Port Authority, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, State Operations, State Police and Emergency Services gave an update on the progress of the storm—and journalists did some Monday-morning quarterbacking.

While the ban on road travel is lifted, drivers are still urged to use caution, particularly commuters trying to get into New York City.

“If you’re coming in from Westchester it is a dangerous drive,” Cuomo said. “Passable does not mean there is not snow and ice on the road.”

Related: Cuomo Lifts Westchester Travel Ban

The officials and the journalists did some Monday-morning quarterbacking on the decision to shut down the trains and subways and ban all road travel overnight.

“It’s fair to say it was less destructive than predicted so far but there were variances in what the storm actually did,” Cuomo pointed out.

The lower Hudson Valley received far less snow than expected, he said, but Long Island was much harder hit.

“Suffolk County is still being hit very hard. there we have serious isues,” he said. “They have significant inches and continued blizzard-like conditions. We will be redeploying much of the equipment from the Hudson Valley and New York City to Suffolk.”

The MTA is bringing trains and subway cars out of storm storage, shoveling platforms and stairs, and picking up trains and conductors. Service will begin at 9 a.m. and by noon the system will be back to Sunday service level, which is about 60 percent of weekday levels, officials said.

The airports are cleared.

However, Cuomo reiterated that people should use caution.

“While the roads are open, that is not to say that unless you need to be on the roads you should be,” he said. “They are passable but there is a level of ice under the snow in many areas. If you don’t have to travel today you really don’t want to.”

He warned drivers to expect delays.

In response to journalists’ questions about the decisions to ban travel overnight and to shut down the MTA, Cuomo said he would rather err on the side of caution.

“I’ve seen the consequences the other way,” he said. “I’d rather say we got lucky than we didn’t get lucky and somebody died.

“We had a storm several weeks ago where I believe the forecast was for a modest amount of snow and we then had seven feet of snow in Buffalo,” he said. “We didn’t close roads because we weren’t expecting that....we had people stranded on roads for 12, 15, 20 hours.”

He said something publicly about inaccurate predictions, and ”I was roundly berated for days for criticizing the weather forecast.”

MTA head Tom Prendergast reminded journalists about the snowfall in New York City Dec. 26, 2012, when trains and buses were stranded.

He said the city’s transportation systems will come back on line much faster than if everything had been exposed to the storm conditions.

Cuomo said the state is in the process of installing a weather system that will be the most sophisticated in the country.

Photo credit: Metro North

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