From left, Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner and NJ Transit CEO/President Kevin Corbett are joined by Reps. Mikie Sherrill, Josh Gottheimer, Frank Pallone, Andy Kim, and Rob Menendez outside the New Brunswick train station on Oct. 23, 2024. (Courtesy of Gottheimer’s office)
Meghan Howard Noveck had a typical, awful day using NJ Transit Wednesday.
Low-level boarding was in effect for her morning train to New Brunswick, so passengers had to exit using one door and walk on wooden platforms across the tracks to get to the platform.
“Don’t worry, they had a staff member there to warn us about the one board that was loose,” Howard Noveck told me.
The whole thing put her about half an hour behind schedule. Frustrating, but she’s used to the kind of service she gets from NJ Transit — whether it’s rail, light rail, or bus.
“It’s not reliable,” she said.
Never fear! A handful of our state’s House delegation met with the CEOs of Amtrak and NJ Transit on Wednesday, toured our rail facilities, and told reporters in New Brunswick that they do not want a repeat of this summer’s series of service delays and cancellations and they pledge things will change — eventually.
“This is not going to happen overnight,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer said.
“We do face an uphill battle when we’re dealing with a Republican majority in the House,” said Rep. Frank Pallone.
“We still don’t have a firm answer right now on what exactly went wrong and, as a result, we can’t give that exact, 100% assurance to the people of New Jersey that they’re not going to see that problem again,” Rep. Andy Kim said.
Such doom and gloom! I went to the press conference expecting to hear some reassurance that our state’s leaders are on top of this mess, but perhaps our members of Congress are smart enough not to raise the hopes of NJ Transit riders, who by now all but expect the terrible, unreliable service they receive day in and day out.
Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner and NJ Transit CEO/President Kevin Corbett offered a few rays of sunshine. Gardner said thousands of feet of wires related to the electrical system that powers the trains have been replaced, other infrastructure has been upgraded, and both agencies have increased their monitoring and inspections. Corbett said the two agencies are working together to modernize equipment that is 90 years old.
Single day of NJ Transit feedback shows wide range of rail rage and bus blues
But Gardner also uttered some defense of the system that made me realize why our House members were less rosy than he was. Only eight trains caused all of the mess this summer, he noted.
“To be clear, we had a unique set of system failures that happened — very few impacts across all the number of trains. Thirty-five thousand trains we ran over a couple of months, we had eight instances occur out of those 35,000 trains,” Gardner said.
I’m sure it’s frustrating to run a train system and have a small percentage of trains give it a bad reputation, but how many thousands of commuters relied on those eight trains? Should they be heartened to know that people riding all the other lines made it to work on time? No A for effort here, sorry.
Corbett added something baffling when discussing train delays: “If a train’s 10 minutes late, people will start hitting Twitter. That comes with the nature of commuter rail and we know that.”
I don’t know if Corbett meant to communicate that the guy who runs the state’s public transit system thinks the problem when a train is 10 minutes late is that people will complain in public about it, but that’s sure how it sounded. Here’s a solution for that: Make the trains run on time and people won’t gripe on social media that they’re late.
I asked Howard Noveck if anything said at Wednesday’s press conference made her feel better.
“Not even a little bit,” she said.
Same. Especially after I woke up Thursday and started seeing all the alerts of NJ Transit issues: Bus 158 out of Fort Lee canceled because there was no driver, train 1105 to Suffern delayed up to 20 minutes because of equipment problems, train 481 also late because of a track condition near Summit.
Just another wonderful day riding NJ Transit. But things will change, they promise!
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.