New Jersey shouldn't rest on transit service

While Governor Murphy delivered good news to NJ Transit riders this week, announcing that fares will not rise at least until mid-2023, attention still needs to be paid to transit service west of the Hudson River. To discuss fare policy without addressing finances is a dead end. Finances hold particular importance in New Jersey, where capital money meant for infrastructure has been used to run buses and trains—a problematic practice that slows investment in infrastructure. The amount transferred this year has increased, and revenue is below budget.

Notable progress has been made in stabilizing NJ Transit service and finances. Transit appears to be somewhat higher priority to policymakers than during the Christie Administration. The Main-Bergen Lines now see at least hourly service all week, and redesigns of Newark-area and Camden-area bus routes around many of the principles I lay out in this post is underway. To rest on laurels now would be a lamentable end given the potential out there.

NJ Transit has significant untapped potential to improve service delivery and cost effectiveness. To start, it should spread the service it runs more evenly during the day than it historically has. Peaky, rush hour-focused service like what NJ Transit has been running recently is often quite costly. Publicly available data shows that NJ Transit delivered 14% less total suburban rail service in 2019 than 2009, primarily due to off-peak service cuts, while spending 2% more in inflation-adjusted terms to run it. Currently, many engineers work upwards of 13 hours per day, drawing associated overtime pay, while only operating one train into New York or Hoboken and another out.

In contrast, train crews on systems with frequent service all day spend much more of their time moving paying passengers. While many overseas counterparts to New Jersey’s suburban rail lines see at least three trains per hour seven days a week, around here, only the Northeast Corridor’s frequency approaches that. Many rail stations still get not a single weekend train, and the Meadowlands Line only gets served on game days despite American Dream having opened months ago. That’s a shame; the region is densely populated and has a wealth of high-quality regional rail infrastructure. That the Toronto suburbs—which resemble American sprawl much more than Manhattan—can fill a single bus route with 40,000 daily trips suggests strongly that a baseline of frequent, consistent transit service can spur a large ridership increase in relatively densely populated New Jersey.

Next, the agency should trim bus routes that parallel rail lines. Carrying a passenger one mile is much more expensive on a bus than a train. Accordingly, buses should generally run where trains don’t; the 712 is a good example of what NJ Transit buses should aspire to. To be fair, rail lines with long interstation distances, such as the Northeast Corridor, or nearly parallel job corridors that rail stations just miss—as is the case with the Coast Line and NJ-35, should continue to get supplementary bus service. However, many current bus routes run right on top of rail lines no more frequently than the trains. That kind of service is of no use to anyone but the absolute lowest-bar rider. Concentrating buses onto fewer, frequent, nonduplicative routes is one of the main reasons why Canadian metro areas boast significantly higher transit mode shares than North Jersey.

As contactless ticketing continues to roll out, NJ Transit should work with labor to reduce train crew sizes. Although one-person train operation now seen on overseas rail and subway systems will require many infrastructure investments, some reduction in train crew sizes is already possible. The new ticketing system supports proof-of-payment ticketing, in no small part because it’s already in place on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, Newark Light Rail, and RIVER Line. Expansion of proof-of-payment, wherein all passengers must validate their own tickets before boarding, to regional rail would allow most fare collectors to be moved up to conductor and engineer roles, particularly on trains that serve no or few low-platform stations. Many suburban rail riders already use an electronic ticket and would see little change. Expansion of frequent baseline service to the whole NJ Transit suburban rail network will require a considerable increase in the engineer and conductor pool, so there is no reason to fire anyone.

As NJ Transit adds service, certain trains should not come back. For example, as painful as this is to say as a former rider, the direct Hoboken-Bay Head trains should stay dead. They carried few riders while gumming up much fuller New York trains. Instead, NJ Transit should add Main-Bergen service and Bay Head shuttles so that transfers add less time.

New York area railroads must also increase their maintenance productivity and reverse a long trend of sacrificing midday frequency and speed in its name. Overseas systems of similar age that have suffered similar ups and downs perform much of their maintenance at night. While the PATH downtown tubes see only three to four trains per hour off-peak, riders on comparable subway and regional rail systems that dispense with midday work can expect consistent service levels of ten trains per hour or more.

One policy that I hope does not gain traction around here is free transit. Even in the depths of 2020-2021, fare revenue comprised around $370 million of the $2.6 billion NJ Transit operating budget. To date, no recurring sources to replace even that much income have been identified, much less enough to offset that from today’s rebounded ridership. In surveys such as this one by TransitCenter, low-income riders clearly express that service comes before fares in determining whether they will ride. To a woefully underserved metro area like New Jersey, a cut to service of even 10% is anathema. Moreover, fare revenue tends to respond much less to political winds than state or federal subsidies. While the farebox recovery ratio should not be the sole metric by which we judge transit service, there is nearly zero overlap between the transit systems that lead the world in providing quality service to a broad cross-section of society and the ones that don’t charge a fare.

While NJ Transit appears to have moved beyond the crisis of the late 2010s, transit service in the region remains in a problematic state. Both agency leaders and the officials to whom they answer need to use the tools at their disposal to remedy that.