Battle of the LIRR stations: Long Beach vs. Island Park

It's not exactly a question burning in the brains of scholars: Why do many Long Beach residents trek over a bridge to Island Park to take the Long Island Rail Road to work?

It's not that the Island Park station is some beacon of beauty compared with the Long Beach station. Its squat building appears never to have a station agent, the waiting room is rarely open and outside is a lone bench and ticket machines. Yet come rain, sleet or snow, some die-hard Long Beach commuters prefer it to the station in their town.

It's a mere six-minute train ride from the one station to the other, but when it comes to commuting every minute counts, especially at the end of a nearly one-hour ride from Penn Station. That is, if all has gone according to schedule. Those six minutes can be a series of starts and stops, as the train waits for another train to pass on the other side, before it chugs across the bridge.

"It's quicker for me to get off in Island Park," said Carrie Murray, a sales manager who works in Manhattan. "I'm over the bridge and home by the time the train gets to Long Beach."

For Murray, though, the choice is not just a matter of getting off the train earlier. The drive to Island Park in the morning can be a job-saver for Johnny and Jane come-lately.

"Three out of five days a week I drive to Island Park because I'm running late," Murray said. "If I can still make the train, instead of waiting another 20 minutes or more for the next train, it's a big deal."

Despite frequenting the Island Park station, Murray hangs on to her $250 annual Long Beach parking permit.

"If you want to leave your car overnight, you can do that on the parking lot in Long Beach," she said, adding that the multi-leveled lot in the city is better in inclement weather.

But parking in Island Park's opened asphalt lot is cheaper. Metered parking is $2 for 12 hours there, compared to $4 for 8 hours in Long Beach.

Some Long Beach commuters who live on the East End find the Island Park train station, which is just a block from the Long Beach Bridge, is actually more convenient than the Long Beach station located in the center of town.

For others, the location of the Long Beach station makes a difference of another sort. Despite restaurants, shops and a Starbucks neighbor the station, which offers magazines, coffee, snacks, information community boards and a wall art by local elementary school children, it is also home to a certain "element," said one commuter who declined to give his name.

"I'm not judging," he said. "I'm blind; my wife had cancer, so with our circumstances we were homeless for a time. But some of the people hanging out in Long Beach, well, let's just say the neighborhood is better in Island Park."   

Others took not of the cast of characters that can sometimes be roaming around the Long Beach station, some chatting, others waiting for someone or just killing time. A LIRR employee and Long Beach resident, Max, who declined to reveal his last name, said the station is a magnet for people who are either down on their luck or disabled, and just hang around or ask for spare change. Max claims to have seen a few fistfights there, too, one with some bloodletting.  

He and his mother live in Long Beach, but he will drive her to the Island Park station when she needs to use the train. "It's easier, less traffic," he said.