“That wait could’ve been a lot worse,” she said. “It’s been a lot worse in the past.”

While riders seemed rather unfazed as they headed home, some of those tasked with helping them seemed buoyant. As the rush drew to a close, transit workers positioned at help desks and officers monitoring the area smiled and waved at familiar faces. Instead of fielding complaints, officers had time to answer less-pressing questions, like what song was playing over the intercom.

The luckiest commuters of the day were perhaps those Long Islanders who drove to Belmont Racetrack to catch luxury coaches to Manhattan. The commuters there — less than 10 total in the morning rush — were nearly outnumbered by workers handing out free apple muffins. Among the unluckiest were those who chose to transfer from the L.I.R.R. to the E train in Jamaica, which was overloaded, hot and sweaty.

“Everything seemed to go right,” said Joseph Lhota, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman, in a 6 p.m. news conference at Penn Station that amounted to an unexpected victory lap. “This is what happens when you plan.”

But he also sounded a note of warning. The list of potential threats to continued smooth operations is long: a mishap in the Amtrak tunnels, a bad thunderstorm, even commuters who let down their guard and decide they no longer have to wake up early to avoid bottlenecks. Each one could cause the chaos that had been feared for today to materialize.

“Tomorrow is another day, and we have to be as vigilant,” he said.

— SHARON OTTERMAN, EMILY PALMER, JEFFERY C. MAYS AND VIVIAN WANG AND NATE SCHWEBER

More riders took trains, but the commute was bearable.

Ridership on trains from both Long Island and New Jersey on Monday morning may have seemed lighter than usual, but the official figures suggested otherwise.