Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Hundreds of people were crammed into the tunnel under the Hudson River, trapped in darkness on a 7:20 p.m. New Jersey Transit train bound for Trenton on July 31. They just wanted to get back to their homes in the suburbs, and the railroad they depended on failed them epically, stranding them under the river for two hours. More insultingly, they had purchased their tickets just after the 15 percent fare increase on July 1; That meant fixing NJ Transit’s stale financial situation post-pandemic.. NJ Transit blamed Amtrak because The old power system had failed. Amtrak blamed NJ Transit for its 50-year-old train not running after power was restored. Later, the suburban railway nevertheless defended itself. An unidentified spokesperson wrote the following email to a reporter recently obtained under New Jersey’s open records law: “NJ TRANSIT operates approximately 700 trains per day, and our most recent on-time performance data from June shows our trains are on time 83% of the time.” ‘ is set at 92.3% when you factor in issues with Amtrak infrastructure. This is far from catastrophic.” They may have decided to challenge the existence of gravity.

Misery spread throughout the system. One passenger described a terrible week in June that came to a head on Thursday, the 20th, when his train to South Orange was canceled from Penn Station and he was forced to return home from Hoboken, whereupon that train was also canceled. He came home after 8.45pm. “It was kind of a disaster,” he recounted. Another, also a white-collar professional, said he now allows an extra hour to commute each morning, just in case. “You have to block out that interim time because you have no idea what’s going to happen that day.” He moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey after the pandemic. “As we enter the city every morning, we stand in the swamp with no cell service and wonder, ‘Well, how long is this going to take?’ we ask. he said. “There were points over time that made me re-evaluate my job and rethink buying a home.”

There are two crises going on at NJ Transit at once. The first is well documented and mostly out of NJT’s control: Despite years of promises and assurances, Amtrak has failed to maintain or modernize the power grid along the Northeast CorridorIt also serves as the primary route for many NJT rail services. The second is that NJ Transit, starved by both Republican and Democratic administrations in Trenton, can no longer fulfill one of its most basic responsibilities: Keeping people moving. The agency canceled nearly 3,400 trains between January and August, or about a hundred trains per week. That’s seven times more than the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s cancellations, which canceled a total of 530 scheduled trips by the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North. The situation is getting worse rather than better: In the first eight months of 2024, NJ Transit’s commuter system recorded 1,200 more cancellations compared to 2023. NJ Transit likes to point fingers at Amtrak, which operates many of its lines, but analysis of agency records shows NJ Transit acknowledges that the bulk of this year’s cancellations were not Amtrak’s fault. Even if you take out the numbers NJ Transit attributes to Amtrak, the number stands at over 2,300, up 800 from last year.

Another way to measure reliability is the average number of miles trains travel between failures. The silver-red train sets known as M8s that the MTA uses on the New Haven Line are tanks. They travel more than 800,000 miles between failures; three trips to the moon. New Jersey Transit trains break down 16 times more often, traveling an average of 49,378 miles. Statistics are bad enough to warrant redrawing New Jersey Transit chart on their website Where it publishes performance statistics so that the line doesn’t literally fall off the page.

NJ Transit management states that its fleet is of advanced age; This is a neat and easy-to-understand explanation, and it fits the facts only to an extent. (The agency had no comment for this story at press time.) Bergen RegistrationTransportation reporter Colleen Wilson recently identified a filing with the NJ Transit Board of Directors dating back to 2022 that shows the reliability of the railroad’s new passenger cars has also deteriorated. When I asked for updated statistics the railroad refused to provide them (and similarly refused to provide the data when I asked again). Data the agency submits annually to the U.S. Department of Transportation helps fill in the gaps: It does far less maintenance on commuter rail trains than the MTA does. (In 2023, Metro-North’s trains ran a total of 4.9 million hours, nearly the same as NJ Transit’s 4.7 million hours. But Metro-North’s workforce will spend 3.2 million hours maintaining its fleet combined, compared to just 2.6 million in 2023. NJ Transit NJT also performed fewer maintenance hours in 2023 than the previous year.) “The bones of the system are getting brittle,” said Zoe Baldwin, the Regional Plan Association’s lead expert on NJ Transit. “We allowed it,” he said. “This affects more than just that day’s commute. Not everyone has the luxury of being an hour late because the train is cancelled, or an hour late picking up their child. This has far-reaching consequences. ” New York pays more in taxes and fees for its trains and sees the difference in service.

Phil Murphy took office in 2017 promising to turn the page on the governorship of Chris Christie, whom he accused of turning NJ Transit into a “national disgrace.” “We will rebuild NJ Transit if it kills me,” he said in his 2019 budget speech. He told reporters at a news conference at Secaucus Junction: “(e)nough is enough. “It’s time not only to clean the house, but also to tear it down and rebuild it.” But more cracks quickly appeared in the façade. He has not committed to a significant increase in NJ Transit’s service or maintenance budget. It will also not commit to major investments in trains and stations. Murphy’s one big idea was to freeze wages; This was good from a public relations standpoint, but it was no more effective a repair strategy than his predecessor’s financial strangulation of the system. But Christie shares the blame not just with Murphy, but with his predecessors as well: He was the last of several governors who did not concern themselves with financing transportation. In 2004, Trenton allocated $618 million, or about $1 billion in today’s dollars, for major projects, modernizations and improvements at NJ Transit. In 2024, Murphy and lawmakers have appropriated just $760 million for the fifth year in a row; This amounts to a shortfall of $2.4 billion per decade. This isn’t like rebuilding “if it kills me.”

Even when everything is going well, lack of funding slows down commutes. For example, MTA uses a more expensive station design than NJT; This design raises the platforms used for boarding and disembarkation four meters above the tracks. Passengers can quickly get on and off the train without stairs, reducing the time they spend at stations and speeding up commutes. New Jersey still has dozens of stations with platforms just inches above the ground. The design is cheaper to build and slows down at each stop. There’s also a ripple effect: NJ Transit’s train cars need two sets of doors at each end (one with stairs and one without stairs) to handle varying platform heights, which means the doors are narrower, creating more bottlenecks . (Wheelchair users face real problems here, too.) It boils down to this: Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road trains generally need only 30 to 40 seconds at each stop, while NJ Transit needs a minute or more. The MTA also invested a lot of money to equip its trains with electric propulsion of the type typically found in subways, significantly increasing their acceleration and deceleration. This cuts out another 30 to 40 seconds at each stop. NJ Transit’s trains are generally pulled by slower locomotives.

These tiny second increments sound ridiculous, but they add up quickly. Save more than a minute per stop on your commute in each direction on a twelve-stop route and twelve minutes back. More than ten runs on this track you will have two hours cut off. You can run a lot of more trains in this extra time. You can see the difference in schedules: A Metro-North train between Stamford and Grand Central takes 58 minutes, making a half-dozen stops along the way on a winding road that travels up to 75 mph. Connecticut An NJ Transit train that travels nearly the same distance to New Brunswick, travels mostly in a straight line, and must be able to sustain nearly twice the speed, would take the same amount of time, because they are much riskier.

The importance of efficiency—the details that keep such things moving—became the focus of a research project I’m working on for the Marron Institute at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. Preliminary estimates from the NYU-Marron study show that electrifying and upgrading every NJ Transit line serving Penn Station or Hoboken to MTA standard (including construction of elevated platform stations) would cost about $10.5 billion. It will take approximately 10 to 15 years to fully establish the program. Once this process was complete, however, a passenger arriving from Trenton to Manhattan on the 7:46 a.m. train would see the round-trip time drop from 93 minutes to 72 minutes in each direction; . Each train carries more than 1000 people. That means lots of missed family dinners, school plays, and Little League games.

I will point out here that the government, which does not pay to keep its trains running, let alone make the necessary investments to provide fast and reliable service, instead finds almost the same amount of money for something else. It wants to spend $10.7 billion to expand the leg of the New Jersey Turnpike from Newark Airport to Jersey City, including building a second bridge over Newark Bay. The environmental review of the bridge alone is a case study in futility. It turns out that this expansion will increase the highway’s eastbound capacity from 4,500 cars per hour to 6,000. Considering the cost of modernization, this roughly corresponds to the number of people on a train All of NJ Transit’s rail services.

How could an administration that came into office promising to rebuild NJ Transit starve it by freezing fares, then reverse and raise those fares anyway? How did this administration struggle to find new funding for NJ Transit right into the middle of the collapse, then come up with a bailout plan that flowed from the general fund and could easily be diverted from NJ Transit when no one was looking? Murphy provided an answer this summer. At a press conference with Amtrak executives in Newark on June 27, he was asked when he last took a train. Murphy praised having had “a very good experience for the most part” and eventually admitted that he didn’t do much cycling. “It’s been a few months,” Murphy said. “I have to get back to this.”