Why does NJ Transit keep canceling trains?

Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Stuck in the dark, hundreds of people were crammed aboard a 7:20 p.m. New Jersey Transit train to Trenton on July 31 as it sat in a tunnel under the Hudson River. They just wanted to get back to their homes in the suburbs, but the railroad they depended on failed miserably, leaving them stranded under the river for a full two hours. Adding insult to injury, they bought the tickets right after a 15 percent fare increase on July 1, which was intended to fix NJ Transit’s battered finances after the pandemic.. NJ Transit blamed Amtrak for its ancient energy system has failed. Amtrak blamed NJ Transit for not running its 50-year-old train after power was restored. Later, the suburban railway still defended itself. An unidentified spokesperson wrote the following email to a reporter, recently obtained under New Jersey’s open records law: “NJ TRANSIT operates nearly 700 trains per day and our latest performance data for June indicates that our trains were running on time. 83% of the time, adjusted to 92.3% when Amtrak’s infrastructure issues are taken into account. This is far from a disaster.” They could just as well decide to challenge the existence of gravity.

Misfortune spilled over the entire system. One passenger recounted a miserable week in June that reached its lowest point on Thursday the 20th when his train home to South Orange was canceled from Penn Station, forcing him to try to return home from Hoboken, after which that train was also canceled . He returned home after 8:45 p.m. “It was kind of a disaster,” he said. Another, also a white-collar professional, told me he now allows an extra hour for each morning commute, just in case. “You have to block that buffer time because you have no idea what’s going to happen that day.” He moved to New Jersey from Brooklyn after the pandemic. “Every morning in the city we just stop in the swamp with no cell service and think, ‘Well, how long is this going to last?’ he said. “There have been times that have made me look at my work and rethink the fact that we bought a house.”

Two crises are unfolding simultaneously at NJ Transit. The first is well-documented and largely beyond NJT’s control: despite years of promises and assurances, Amtrak has failed to maintain or upgrade the power grid along the Northeast Corridorwhich also serves as a trunk route for many NJT rail services. Second, NJ Transit, starved by both Republican and Democratic administrations in Trenton, can no longer fulfill one of its primary responsibilities: keeping people moving. Between January and August, the agency canceled nearly 3,400 trains, or about a hundred a week. That’s seven times more than the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North, which canceled 530 scheduled flights combined. Things are getting worse, not better: In the first eight months of 2024, NJ Transit reported 1,200 more cancellations than in 2023. NJ Transit likes to point the finger at Amtrak, which serves many of its routes, but an analysis of the agency’s reports shows that NJ Transit admits that the bulk of the cancellations this year were not Amtrak’s fault. Even if you subtract those that NJ Transit can secure for Amtrak, the number is still over 2,300, an increase of 800 from last year.

Another way to measure reliability is the average number of miles a train runs between breakdowns. The silver and red trains that the MTA uses on the New Haven line, known as the M8, 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. The statistics are so bad that New Jersey Transit had to redraw chart on your website where he posts performance stats, so the line literally didn’t come off the page.

NJ Transit management cites the advanced age of its fleet, which is a clear and easy-to-understand explanation — and only partially true. (The agency had no comment on this story at press time.) The Bergen recordTransportation journalist Colleen Wilson recently spotted a filing to the NJ Transit board of directors dated 2022 that showed the reliability of the railroad’s new passenger cars also suffered from skids. When she asked for updated statistics, the railroad refused to provide them (and also refused to provide the data when I asked again). Data the agency files annually with the U.S. Department of Transportation help fill in the gaps: It performs far less maintenance on its commuter trains than the MTA. (In 2023, Metro-North trains put in a combined 4.9 million hours, nearly as much as NJ Transit’s 4.7 million hours. But Metro-North’s workforce put in a combined 3.2 million hours of maintenance on its fleet, compared to (only 2.6 million on NJ Transit also spent less time on maintenance in 2023 than the previous year.) “We’ve allowed the system to become fragile,” said Zoe Baldwin, lead expert on NJ Transit at the Regional Plan Association. “It doesn’t just affect the daily commute. Not everyone has the luxury of being an hour late because your train is cancelled, or an hour late to pick up a child. This has very far-reaching consequences. New York pays more for its trains, taxes and fares, and sees the difference in service.

Phil Murphy took office in 2017 promising to turn the page on Chris Christie’s governorship, which he accused of turning NJ Transit into a “national disgrace.” In his 2019 budget speech, he declared that “if it kills me, we will rebuild NJ Transit.” At a press conference in Secaucus Junction, he told reporters that “(f)enough is enough. It’s time not just to clean the house, but to demolish it and rebuild it.” But soon new cracks appeared on the facade. It would not commit to a significant increase in NJ Transit’s ongoing service or maintenance budget. Nor was he going to invest heavily in trains and stations. Murphy’s only big idea was to freeze fares, good for public relations but no more effective recovery strategy than his predecessor’s financial strangulation of the system. However, Christie shares the blame not only with Murphy, but also with their predecessors: He was the last of several governors who were not interested in funding transit. In 2004, Trenton allocated $618 million for major projects, upgrades and improvements to NJ Transit, or about $1 billion in today’s terms. In 2024, Murphy and lawmakers appropriated just $760 million for the fifth year in a row — a shortfall that adds up to $2.4 billion over the decade. It’s not like an “if it kills me” rebuild.

Even when things are working, lack of funding slows down travel. For example, the MTA uses a more expensive station design than the NJT that raises the boarding and disembarking platforms four feet above the track. Passengers can quickly enter and exit the train without stairs, reducing the time they spend at stations and speeding up journeys. New Jersey still has dozens of stations with platforms that are only a few inches above the ground. The structure is cheaper to build and it slows down every stop. It also has a ripple effect: NJ Transit cars require two sets of doors at each end — one with steps and one without — to deal with the varying height of the platforms, which means the doors are narrower, creating more bottlenecks. (Wheelchair users face real challenges, too.) It boils down to this: Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road trains typically only take 30-40 seconds at each stop, while NJ Transit takes a minute or more. The MTA has also invested a lot of money in equipping its trains with electric propulsion, which is common in subways, greatly improving their acceleration and deceleration. This cuts another 30-40 seconds off each stop. NJ Transit trains are usually pulled by locomotives that are slower.

These small steps, second by second, sound strange, but they add up quickly. Deduct an extra minute for each stop on a trip in each direction on a twelve-stop route, and you get twelve minutes back. In ten runs on this track, you cut two hours. With that extra time, you can run a bunch more trains. You can see the difference in the schedules: A Metro-North train travels between Stamford and Grand Central in 58 minutes, making half a dozen stops along the way on a curve-filled track that clocks in at 75 miles per hour. Connecticut. An NJ Transit train that goes about the same distance to New Brunswick, mostly in a straight line that should be almost double the speed, takes just as long because those trains are so much worse.

The importance of bandwidth—the kind of detail that keeps things moving—is the subject of a research project I’m working on for the Marron Institute at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. Early projections from a NYU Marron study show that it would cost about $10.5 billion to electrify and upgrade (including building these high-platform stations) every New Jersey Transit line serving Penn Station or Hoboken to MTA standards. It will probably take 10 to 15 years to fully establish the program. But when it was done, a commuter arriving in Manhattan from Trenton on the 7:46 a.m. train saw their commute cut from 93 minutes to 72 each way, nearly three-quarters of an hour back in that person’s day. . Each train carries more than 1,000 people. That’s a lot of unmissed family dinners, school plays and Little League games.

I note here that a state that won’t pay to keep its trains in working order, let alone the investment needed to provide fast and reliable services, has instead found almost the same amount of money to spend on something else. He wants to spend $10.7 billion to expand the section of the New Jersey Turnpike that runs from Newark Airport to Jersey City, including building a second bridge over Newark Bay. Only the ecological examination of the bridge is an example of its futility. It shows that this extension will increase the highway’s eastbound capacity from 4,500 cars per hour to 6,000. That’s about the same as the number of people on one train, when the cost of the upgrade is factored in all NJ Transit rail services.

How did an administration that came into office promising to rebuild NJ Transit get it to freeze fares, then cancel and raise those fares? How did this administration try to find new funding for NJ Transit while it was in the middle of collapse and then come up with a bailout plan that flows through the general fund where it can be easily diverted from NJ Transit when no one is looking? This summer, Murphy provided the answer. He was asked during a news conference with Amtrak management on June 27 in Newark when he last rode the train. Murphy touted his “mostly very good experience” before eventually admitting he didn’t ride it much. “It’s been a few months,” Murphy said. “I have to get back to it.”