NJT 10-year plan

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Dave Alan
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Joined: Mon Nov 24, 2014 10:55 pm

NJT 10-year plan

Post by Dave Alan »

NJ Transit has several planning documents that have recently been released and can be found at www.njtplans.com.

There is a lot of material to review, and I suggest that you take a look. I have reviewed them, and here are my comments.


As I originally believed, this is a "feelgood" document that has serious flaws. The one that comes to mind immediately is that it was prepared apparently without any input from the advocates for the riders. That means US. If anybody from NJT or its consultant(s) specifically asked any of you for your opinion on any of the topics in the plan, please let me know.

Ironically, the document itself is totally obsolete. Even though it is new, circumstances have changed so drastically since the COVID-19 virus hit that any assumptions underlying the plan and its any strategies to implement it are either no longer valid, or else they are questionable. In the latter case, it will take time before we know if circumstances have changed sufficiently to render those parts of the document obsolete, too.

Many more people are working from home than was the case three months ago. We do not know how many of them will return to traditional 5-day commuting to their offices, but it seems certain that some will continue to work from home at least on some workdays, and some others will go to the office after the morning peak. These events will flatten the peak-commuting curve, which will eliminate the need for continuing to direct large amounts of resources toward peak-hour commuting. There will not be a need for as much infrastructure, service or as many employees as in the past. We do not know the extent of the change, but NJT needs to be prepared for it. We should do what we can to convince them to plan with an open mind.

There is also the factor that health authorities are opposed to transit, and have "warned" people to go places alone in their automobiles. That will depress ridership, too, and we will not know the full extent for awhile.

Much of the document goes into generic goals, with no specific plans to attain them. For example, there is a goal of increasing the use of new technology for fare collection, but there is no mention of fare-integration between modes, which the new technology could accommodate. Commuters get a slight break with a local bus or light-rail fare thrown in, but single-trip riders do not. That sort of inequity could be cured easily, but the document does not call for that. The document refers to "seamless intermodal travel" but schedules still call for many potential linked trips to take a great deal of extra travel time, because trains are scheduled to mis-connect at transfer points. If you have ever attempted to travel between the M&E and a destination on the historic Erie lines or the Newark Division, you would know that almost every such trip requires an extra 60 minutes' travel time because of scheduled mis-connections at Newark or Secaucus.

one particularly salient point in the "Goals" section is that NJT is striving for "no preventable cancellations" by 2025! In other words, even their best hope will sentence us to five more years of grossly unreliable service!

Some of the capital projects make no sense, others will make traveling worse, some will probably not be cost-effective, but we do not yet know how many riders they might help. Some make sense now, but not many. Bring the third track of the M&E into Millburn Station makes sense, and moving West Summit Interlocking probably does, too. The Hunter Flyover would help if there are still enough trains going "reverse direction" to or from Newark Penn at peak-commuting times, but we do not know what future service patters will look like.

The Hoboken project appears disastrous. It would place new tracks, where many trains would be assigned, as far as possible from PATH, buses and the street. Almost everybody would have a significantly longer walk, except for riders catching the light rail. There is also no need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to increase capacity at Hoboken, because it is underutilized. NJT has discouraged Hoboken ridership over the past several years; a policy that has not been reversed. On the M&E, there have been several rounds of cuts since 2006, but none of the trains that were eliminated since that time have ever returned to the schedule.

One likely outcome of the COVID-19 virus is a sharp economic contraction. Unemployment in New Jersey now exceeds 15% officially; the highest number since the 1930s. Nobody knows how soon, or even to what extent, the economy will recover. Tax revenues, both sales and income, are down, and even Gov. Murphy has acknowledged that New Jersey is entering hard times. Because of that, there is essentially no money for projects that do not keep the railroad and other components of the transit system in a state of good repair, except in special cases. That could apply to everything form Gateway projects to projects that would help a specific developer, to projects that would serve only a few stations or a small number or riders, to expensive bridge replacements when rehabilitation might be sufficient.

I remember the Transit-2020 plan, which had 19 new projects, with more to be studied. They included the Lackawanna Cutoff, West Trenton, light rail to Glassboro, MOM, and a number of other projects. As Jack correctly pointed out, they are no longer in the plan. None of those projects was ever built, except the branch to the Meadowlands Sports Complex, so none of the project that would have provided full service for many places in the state will probably never be built, just like they were not built by now.

I do not see prosperous times for transit, at NJT or elsewhere. The economy is falling down, transit itself is under threat from health authorities, and riding patters may be about to change drastically. In my opinion, the planning documents are now obsolete, they were designed for different circumstances, and it is time to start over. This time, NJT should consult with US, too, becaue we know what it is like to ride, and maybe to depend on the transit they allow us to have.

DAVID PETER ALAN
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