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For Many New Jersey Transit Commuters, Last Year’s ‘Summer of Hell’ Is Now

New Jersey’s new governor, Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, has promised the state’s commuters that train service would improve after years of decline. What he did not warn them was that it would get so much worse before it got better.

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By
Patrick McGeehan
, New York Times

New Jersey’s new governor, Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat, has promised the state’s commuters that train service would improve after years of decline. What he did not warn them was that it would get so much worse before it got better.

Seven months after Murphy took office, many regular riders of New Jersey Transit, the state-run network of trains and buses, have become increasingly irate over a rash of train cancellations this summer that has made the nation’s second busiest commuter rail system even less reliable.

“It’s really just a crapshoot on whether the train’s going to run on time,” said Jeremy King, 27, who has been riding New Jersey Transit from Princeton Junction to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan for more than two years. “The past few months has really just been awful.”

He and his fellow frustrated commuters are not imagining the deterioration. New Jersey Transit’s own numbers indicate that the agency has had a significant problem fulfilling its schedule this summer. In a six-week period starting June 1, there were 330 trains that did not run and 64 more trains that did not complete their runs, according to Nancy Snyder, a spokeswoman for New Jersey Transit. The agency operates about 18,000 trains a month.

That was nearly twice as many annulments — the term the agency uses for trains that never started their runs — as New Jersey Transit recorded in the same period last year, when it had 174. And this unplanned reduction in service came on top of a reduced schedule the agency adopted earlier this year to allow for the installation of new equipment on its fleet.

The primary cause of the cancellations has been a shortage of crews to run the trains, Snyder said. Some crews have been diverted for the installation and testing of an automatic-braking system known as positive train control. Other workers are taking vacations. And there have been “some mechanical issues” as well, she said.

To make matters worse, the PATH train system, which also operates between New Jersey and Manhattan and can be an alternative when New Jersey Transit is hobbled, has had its own share of problems. The operators of the PATH system said that the installation of positive train control, which federal regulators ordered to be completed by the end of the year, has also been the main culprit for its lack of reliability. The PATH, which runs between Newark, New Jersey, and Manhattan, has shut down one of its lines every weekend this summer.

To address the shortage of locomotive engineers, New Jersey Transit has ramped up its recruitment and training, doubling the number of classes in its 20-month training course for engineers, Snyder said. She said the agency also had worked with union officials on a plan to give conductors the chance to become engineers.

But union officials said that New Jersey Transit was losing some experienced engineers to other railroads in the region that pay better, including Metro-North.

New Jersey Transit has been strapped for cash for years. Former Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, repeatedly reduced the amount of direct aid the state gave to the agency, forcing it to divert money from its budget for capital investments toward day-to-day operations.

Murphy has vowed to reverse that drain. In his first budget, he included an additional $242 million for New Jersey Transit that he said would allow the agency to hire 114 additional workers.

When Murphy introduced Kevin Corbett as the new executive director of New Jersey Transit in January, he said, “Starting today we will begin to measure success by actually getting better, not because New Jersey Transit didn’t actually get any worse.”

But to many riders canceling (or annulling) the same evening train three days in a row this week would certainly count as a failure. That happened with train #807 on the Morris & Essex line, which was supposed to depart Hoboken at 5:28 p.m., but never did on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.

Even more troubling has been the frequent cancellation of trains during the morning rush hours. Just ask Kristin Padden.

Padden, a lawyer, usually leaves home near Princeton at about 7:20 a.m., and if all goes well, arrives at her office in lower Manhattan around 8:45. But little has gone well on her commute this summer, she said.

She normally boards an express train — #3926 — scheduled to leave Princeton Junction at 7:45 a.m. But for three consecutive weekdays in late July, New Jersey Transit canceled a local train — #3828 — that is supposed to depart nine minutes earlier. On each occasion, Padden’s express became a local that crept up the Northeast Corridor.

One of those days, she arrived in Newark’s Penn Station, where she switches to a PATH train to the World Trade Center, at 9:05. To her misfortune, she became a victim of the problems that have also been plaguing the PATH train system.

At that time of day, Padden’s PATH ride is supposed to take 22 minutes. But she did not arrive at work until 10 a.m., a full 2 1/2 hours after leaving home. On the way home that night, more cancellations led to a return trip that was nearly as long, she said. In all, it took nearly five hours to complete a round-trip commute of about 100 miles.

Michael Marino, who oversees PATH for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said complications in switching between sections of the system that have positive train control technology working and those that do not had caused problems during weekday rush hours. The PATH usually has about 98 percent on-time performance but that fell into “the mid-80s” in some weeks this summer, Marino said.

That sudden decline led some riders to attack Marino personally on social media, he said. In a posting he was shown by his grandson, he said, “One guy took my picture and made me look like a Barnum & Bailey clown.”

Overall, the PATH stayed on schedule about 94 percent of the time in June, the Port Authority said. Marino vowed that the performance would improve and that the PATH would be the only railroad in the region to complete installation of positive train control by Dec. 31. New Jersey Transit is more than halfway toward completing its installation and expects to receive a two-year extension of the deadline, Snyder said. For his part, King has taken to Twitter to sound off about the problems he has encountered trying to get to work from New Jersey. But he said the lack of an adequate response from New Jersey Transit has left him more aggravated and wondering if it was a mistake to count on its trains to get him to and from work for $420 a month.

After a string of cancellations, King, who normally rides the same morning train as Padden, tried catching an earlier train, leaving at 7:27 a.m. But it wound up running as a local and got stuck behind a slow-moving train, getting him to Manhattan no earlier than usual.

“This is the new normal: Everyone starts taking our their phones and emailing their bosses that they’re going to be late,” King said. The uncertainty, he said, “has added a whole new level of stress to my day-planning.”

Padden, who pays almost $500 a month in commuting costs, said the last several weeks had been considerably worse than last summer, when the replacement of tracks at Penn Station was forecast by New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to create a “summer of hell.”

Commuters were duly warned last year and braced for the disruptions, she said. But, she added, “This summer, there’s no transparency and no warning and thus, no way to plan. Every day it’s something else and we never know until we start the commute for the day.”

This summer, Padden said, “is far more hellish.”

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