Maybe better then in the 1970's. But;
1. In the 1990's they bought a diesel / dd fleet designed to not fit into the East River tunnel.
2. They should have rebuilt at least the M3's years ago.
3. Every so many decades, they buy a new fleet and try to abandon the previous. They never rebuild, and poorly maintain their fleets. For instance, I was on a train years ago when the rusted out engineer's seat in the leading GP38-2 broke off its pedestal. Also, with the C1's, they did not have a replacement schedule for the emergency batteries in the cars. As the batteries died, when the Bitanic arrived daily at Penn, passengers daily had to use the emergency door releases to open the doors, eventually braking them. One day I reached out to someone high up in LIRR and suggested they change those batteries finally. OOPS! Within a month, the worst of the door problems had gone away. On the C1's, they didn't take care of the a/c units, including cleaning out the drains. In the rain, the overflow would pour into the vestibules and flood them, and sometimes the lower deck as well. The old rustbucket fleet actually had holes in the floor where you could see the tracks below. Plus the cars that had their own generators slung below got so little maintenance that half the cars would have no power due to no fuel in the tanks. I could go on and on, of course.
4. When they ordered the DM's and DE's and the C3's, they knew, and privately acknowledged at the time that they had not bought enough equipment.
5 . I believe it was last summer that they waited too late to get the MARC cars, so there were extreme car shortages every Thursday, Friday in diesel country. The Cannonball trips were great for the young drunks, but were hell on passengers in diesel country.
6. They are still using schedules based on ones from the 1890's. I've seen piles of half empty trains at Penn on some lines while other lines are badly overcrowded.
7. The M7 trains were full of design mistakes, some of which made for a lot less interior space width wise.
8., On the M9's (do we still have only 2 trains worth in service?), they put the AC outlets in a really bad spot. They probably should have been either on seatbacks (flush) or somewhere else on the seats.
9. On the C3's, they removed trackside equipment that allowed station announcements. They were supposed to put in modern equipment in the locos to bring them back to life - a year or two ago.
Just a few examples of one of the top 5 worse commuter railroads in the US. THese days I have to concede that thanks to Chris Christie and others, NJT is worse. Not sure about MN.
Also, these days, piles of people have to commute between Long Island and north of NYC. Makes traffic horrible. To use mass transit, even if you may SOMEDAY connect at GCT, that would make, just east of Huntington, a 5 hour round trip, versus 6 plus hours today. MTA knows, but ignores the need to connect LIRR to MN in the Bronx. Would it be cheap? Not do do all lines, but badly needed. Xfer at Jamaica to a shuttle that crosses the Bronx connecting to New Haven (easy), Harlem and Hudson lines. These days lots of people are losing their jobs when greedy bosses move jobs out of NYC to north of NYC.