NYT: What’s the first issue you’ll focus on?

ENG: The big thing is really communication. Riders feel like they haven’t been heard. They also want real-time communication from us, not only with our daily service but also on incidents, the status of the incident and the actual cause of the incident. We also need to make sure we have people in our key hubs who can talk to our customers and give them the answers that they need.

NYT: You commute to Queens from Smithtown on the L.I.R.R. What are other problems you’ve personally experienced that you’d like to fix?

ENG: Cleanliness. That means doing better with the appearance of our stations, with the cleanliness of the trains and the bathrooms. Also, crowded cars. That might mean schedule adjustments, and it might be taking a look at how many trains can run and how many cars we can put on the train.

John Sadocha of East Norwich asks: I commute five days per week, and the L.I.R.R. is the worst part of my day. How will you stop the weekly breakdowns, cancellations and never-on-time schedules?

ENG: A lot of the weekly delays and cancellations are attributed to a failure in the system. We need to fix the signals, and fix the switches, and fix our tracks. And we need to address them proactively. Traditionally, we might find a defect — one that might not be that severe that we need to address now — and say, it can wait for a capital project [an investment in the system]. What we should be doing is repairing those defects now, and doing a permanent repair, so that we can avoid those delays that are caused by those components failing.