Every day, radio producer Brandon Tagoe boards an early morning train from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Penn Station in Manhattan.
The short commute is supposed to give him more than enough time to get to his “dream job” in New York City by 5:15 a.m. But Tagoe, 28, said New Jersey Transit’s recent string of problems and delays has left him chronically late — and that hasn’t put him in his boss’s good graces.
“I had to make myself heard,” Tagoe lamented last week while at Penn Station. “I had a meeting with my boss about the importance of being on time, and he was threatened with repercussions if this continued. »
“It happens so often,” he said of the delays. “And nothing is being done about it.”
NJT has been frustrating its riders for years. But a series of delays, slowdowns and outright cancellations in June – combined with aging railcars, old infrastructure and an ironically scheduled 15% fare hike that begins Monday – has left commuters who make the harrowing journey from the Garden State to Manhattan, falling just short. I hope things will get better.
“They can do better, for sure,” Kanesha Hayes, a 39-year-old sanitation worker, told the Post during the worst of last week’s delays. “I pay $200 a month, I’m told it’s increasing, but the service is still terrible.
“I can’t be late all the time,” she continued. “I got a warning for being late. My job is to be on time and I don’t want to lose my job.”
Talia Crawford, chief advocacy and organizing officer for the New York-based Tri-State Transportation Campaign, said many of the problems stem from years of financial shortfalls and budgetary neglect — even though the agency was allocated a whopping $2.9 billion in 2023.
“New Jersey Transit has been in a budget deficit for 10 years – and we’re almost in a billion-dollar hole,” she said last week.
But it’s difficult to pump more money into the agency’s coffers because it’s competing for the same dollars as every other state-funded department in New Jersey.
“Transportation competes with education, hospitals and other public services,” Crawford said. “I don’t think it gets as much support as it does today because we recognize the importance of public transportation and how many people actually use it.”
The results of this chronic underfunding have been on full display in recent weeks, when already frustrated riders suffered a series of nightmarish delays caused by problems with Amtrak’s overhead lines, electrical and mechanical problems with NJT trains. , a brush fire in the Meadowlands and a blown circuit breaker that knocked out power between Newark and Midtown stations.
In a statement last week, NJT President and CEO Kevin Corbett said he was hearing riders’ complaints.
“We are as frustrated as our customers, and the frequency and impact of these issues on our customers’ quality of life is clearly unacceptable,” Corbett wrote, adding that the agency is working with Amtrak to find the “root cause of the recent wave of incidents affecting the northeast corridor.
“We can say that we operate approximately 700 trains every day of the week on hundreds of miles of track, on 11 rail lines, with the same equipment. And these incidents are occurring primarily on this one stretch of track in the Northeast Corridor between Newark and New York,” he said.
Amtrak — which owns the infrastructure and charges NJT about $200 million a year to run its round-trip trains to New York — has also acknowledged problems on the lines.
In a June 21 letter to customers, Amtrak President Roger Harris apologized to “anyone who was inconvenienced” by the avalanche of problems, and said the problems appeared to be “clean to the equipment and the area.
“We have formed a joint team with NJT to identify the source of this damage and implement improvements,” he wrote. “Regardless of the causes that led to these delays, you deserve better service and we are committed to providing it.”
Despite the cascading problems, help is on the horizon.
A NJ Transit spokesperson said the agency will soon receive 138 new multi-level railcars that will be much more reliable than others in the aging fleet. Some of them could be in service by the end of this year.
And late last week, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a state budget that included a 2.5 percent tax hike on the state’s largest businesses — the proceeds of which would go toward directly to closing NJT’s nearly $1 billion budget deficit, according to Politico.
“You saw the drama that played out in New York, New York State, with the MTA, where they were going to rely on third parties, essentially, to solve their budget challenge in the transportation system in common,” the governor said, referring to the Big Apple’s failed congestion pricing plan.
“We all decide to resolve our problems within our own four walls, and sometimes it’s not without pain. »
Then there’s the $16 billion Hudson Tunnel Project, which will build a new two-track rail tunnel between Bergen Palisades and Manhattan, according to the project’s website.
It will also rehabilitate the existing North River Tunnel, which opened in 1910 but still handles around 450 trains every day during the week.
That could ease the everlasting pain of former Gov. Chris Christie’s 2010 decision to scrap the $8.7 billion ARC plan, which would have built two new rail lines between New York and New Jersey.
Last summer, Murphy told NBC’s Chuck Todd that his predecessor’s decision was “the biggest political mistake in New Jersey in the last 50 years.”
Of course, transit riders may not want to hold their breath while waiting for new rail lines: The Hudson Tunnels won’t open until 2035, and the North River crossings won’t be repaired until 2038.
Crawford, the transit advocate, said New Jersey’s corporate tax increase — expected to raise about $800 million a year — will help keep NJT afloat, but won’t solve the problem. issue.
“It would just get them out of the hole,” she said. “This does not address any of the service issues and improvements that NJ Transit needs. And it won’t add service.
Yet this is the first time the state has invested in public transport as a necessary public service, she said. And this must continue.
“This should be a priority and funding going forward…so that runners can actually see the changes that we need and want,” she said.
Meanwhile, Amtrak and NJT officials jointly announced last week that they would increase inspections and maintenance work on “a variety of infrastructure and fleet systems” following the recent wave of service disruptions.
“This will be a comprehensive effort focused on both Amtrak’s infrastructure – including the electric traction system that powers the trains, the catenary (the system of overhead electrical cables that are part of the traction system electrical), signals and switches – and NJ TRANSIT equipment, including the pantograph system that connects to the catenary and consumes power for the train,” the agencies said in a joint statement.
The riders, for their part, have little confidence in the agency. And even less hope that things will improve.
“There are a lot of issues they need to work on to improve service,” said Dalbert Artiles, a lab technician who drives NJT from Manhattan’s Penn Station to his job in New Brunswick.
“The situation is not going to get better anytime soon,” he continued. “I expect it to get worse – and that worries me.”