After keeping their social distance from trains during the height of the pandemic, weekend Long Island Rail Road riders are back in a big way, and then some, according to a new state report.

Alfonso A. Castillo and Joseph Ostapiuk report in NEWSDAY that according to the report by the office of NYS Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, weekend ridership on the LIRR was 27% higher last year than in 2019 — a year in which the railroad set a modern ridership record. The boom in Saturday and Sunday demand has helped offset lagging weekday rush hour ridership, which remains nearly 40% down from pre-COVID levels, according to MTA data.

Officials and riders attributed the railroad's surging weekend ridership to several factors, such as the boost in service that came with the opening of Grand Central Madison, and the growing cost of driving.

LIRR ticket prices have also recently increased. But new discount promotions have reduced the cost for families traveling on the LIRR on weekends.

The LIRR averaged 267,567 riders each weekend in 2025, up from 210,313 in 2019. The railroad's weekend ridership has been trending up for years, beating 2019 levels in nearly every month since 2023, when the railroad opened Grand Central Madison and significantly boosted service levels to accommodate a second Manhattan terminal.

Although the LIRR's overall ridership has bounced back faster than the MTA predicted, the railroad closed out 2025 still down about 8% from pre-COVID levels.

Among all Metropolitan Transportation Authority agencies, including subways, city buses and Metro-North, the LIRR on weekends is "the only transit mode analyzed where ridership has fully recovered and even improved compared to the pre-pandemic baseline," the report said.

But weekend ridership recovery has outpaced the MTA’s expectations across all its agencies since the pandemic, when trains and buses were largely empty for months. After carrying 91 million passengers in 2019 — the most in 70 years — LIRR ridership plummeted to just 30 million in 2020. Last year, it was nearly 82 million, buoyed by particularly strong weekend crowds.

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Later this month, Southampton Town Highway Department crews will begin work on a long-awaited pedestrian enhancement project in Noyac that will bring sidewalks and crosswalks to a more than 2-mile stretch of Noyac Road, improving pedestrian accessibility and safety along the busy corridor. Cailin Riley reports on 27east.com that Southampton Town Highway Superintendent Charles McArdle and engineer Nick Jimenez were on hand at the Noyac Civic Council meeting last week to discuss the plan, which is being fully funded by the Town of Southampton. Jimenez and McArdle said they expected crews to start breaking ground on April 27, but cautioned that the project will take much longer to complete than the recent repaving and restriping of Noyac Road, which was done in about a week. This project could take up to 12 weeks to complete.

On the bright side, McArdle and Jimenez said there was a good chance the sidewalks would be finished before the height of the summer season, as long as the weather cooperates. If there are extended delays, and the traffic becomes untenable as the summer season bears down, it’s possible the project would require a break and then be picked back up in September to complete.

Sidewalks and several crosswalks will be added down a roughly 2.5-mile stretch of Noyac Road, starting at Ruggs Path east of Trout Pond Park and will continue easterly along Noyac Road, past Serene Green, to Cove Avenue East, where it will meet an existing sidewalk that extends all the way to Sag Harbor Village.

The sidewalks will predominantly be on the south side of the road, but will be installed on the north side at certain points, including near MJ Dowlings and Jimmy Jim’s.

Several new crosswalks will be installed, along with the diamond-shaped pedestrian crossing signs with blinking lights.

The Noyac Civic Council leadership strongly urged members who live along that stretch to review the plans, which can be found in detail at noyac.org.

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Shelter Island Friends of Music presents Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner, on piano in concert tomorrow at 6pm in Shelter Island Presbyterian Church. A full capacity crowd is expected so you are encouraged to arrive early to get a seat. Due to fire code regulations, organizers cannot guarantee seating once that capacity is reached. Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner has emerged as one of the most compelling pianists of his generation.

Saturday’s concert is free; donations are greatly appreciated.

The performance will begin promptly at 6 pm tomorrow in Shelter Island Presbyterian Church with no intermission.

You are invited to a reception with Llewellyn immediately following the concert!

For further info visit the Shelter Island Friends of Music website at sifriendsofmusic.org

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Gov. Kathy Hochul…running for reelection as the Democratic party candidate in this year’s gubernatorial race…is getting politically pulled further to the left on New York’s sanctuary policies – now saying she supports banning nearly all cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE. Vaughn Golden reports in The N.Y. POST that Governor Hochul, who proposed a slate of anti-ICE measures at the start of this year, yesterday unveiled several new restrictions that she wants to put into state law as part of the ongoing budget negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Legislature.

“I just want to have more protections in place that I think are long overdue. So I’m anxious to get this done,” Hochul told reporters at a quickly assembled press event in Albany Thursday afternoon.

Among the newly announced measures was a ban on police cooperating with federal immigration enforcement agents — unless it involves a criminal conviction or cops have “probable cause” to suspect someone of a misdemeanor or felony offense. “Local cops should be focused on local crimes, keeping our streets safe … not doing ICE’s job,” she said. Hochul also wants to ban US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from wearing masks, though it’s unclear how the state would be able to enforce such a mandate. The proposed legislation would make it a misdemeanor for an ICE agent to wear a mask in the State of New York.

And it would expand the list of public areas where ICE is prohibited from operating without a judicial warrant, to include virtually any public land like parks, shelters and “housing accommodations.”

Hochul also said that ICE agents, for example, wouldn’t be allowed to operate alongside a local police DWI checkpoint.

“We’re talking about basically separating out civil infractions, vehicle and traffic law, for example, and other areas that they’ve been using as ruses,” she said.

“There’s sometimes ICE officers, are at a DWI stop, are at a traffic stop. Like why are they there? Explain to me why they’re there,” she questioned.

The new policy would also create an overarching ban on any public employee using state resources, including their working hours, to aid federal immigration authorities.

It means New York would essentially have a blanket sanctuary state law on its books. Hochul, during her tenure, has continued to extend an executive order signed in 2018 by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo barring state employees and law enforcement from helping immigration authorities.

The Democratic incumbent is now expanding her initial anti-ICE proposal unveiled in January following talks with the legislature, coinciding with her $263 billion spending and policy plan, which was due April 1.

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New York will lose more than $73.5 million in federal money because the Transportation Department said yesterday that the State of New York has refused to revoke nearly 33,000 questionable commercial driver's licenses for immigrants since an audit uncovered problems last year.

The department said that more than half of the 200 licenses reviewed during the audit had significant problems such as remaining valid long after an immigrant was authorized to be in the country. So the state was ordered to review all of this type of licenses and revoke illegal ones.

As reported by The Associated Press and posted on NEWSDAY.com, the federal government has reviewed records related to these non-domiciled CDLs in every state since Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy put a spotlight on this issue after an August crash in Florida that killed three people. Most states have either complied or are in negotiations with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, but California has lost $200 million. Several other states — including Pennsylvania, Minnesota and North Carolina — have been warned they are at risk of losing some funding.

“I promised the American people I would hold any state leader accountable for failing to keep them safe from unvetted, unqualified foreign drivers. I’m delivering on that promise today,” Duffy said.

Duffy has said that immigrants account for about 20% of all truck drivers nationwide, but these non-domiciled licenses immigrants can receive only represent about 5% of all commercial driver’s licenses or about 200,000 drivers. New York issued 32,606 of them. New rules the Transportation Department has announced will prevent 97% of those foreign drivers from getting a commercial license again.

New York officials have defended their licensing practices and said they are complying with federal law and that audits during the first Trump administration supported that.

Trucking industry groups have praised the Transportation Department's efforts to get unqualified drivers off the road...