The public hearings of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have long been an exercise in commuter catharsis.

An open microphone. A stuffy room. And a captive audience of New York City’s transit leaders, obliged to listen to, or at least pretend to listen to, rider soliloquies involving slothful buses, impolitic railroad ticket agents, subway stations in disrepair.

So, what does it look like when the authority has good news to deliver?

On Wednesday, Fernando Ferrer, the authority’s acting chairman, and a cadre of transit officials endeavored to find out. Under state guidelines, the authority is required to hold a public hearing whenever it adjusts a part of its service by 25 percent or more. And in the rarest of turns, officials said, the authority held a hearing whose sole focus was not a decrease, but an increase in service: more frequent off-peak railroad service at the Spuyten Duyvil, Riverdale and Irvington stations along Metro-North Railroad’s Hudson Line.

And so at 5 p.m., within the pale walls of the Riverdale YM-YWHA’s multipurpose room, Mr. Ferrer welcomed a crowd of about 20 — including four other authority officials, a technical team to record the proceedings, a few police officers, and their black Labrador retriever — to a gathering he called “probably a little unusual in the spectrum of governmental agency hearings.”