Train delays, cancellations, a lack of communication, overcrowding, increased fares, tangled wires — NJ Transit commuters have had plenty to complain about this summer.
So when my editors suggested I spend an entire day riding the NJ Transit rails in North Jersey to experience things for myself, I had some obvious trepidation. But I was also game, and wanted to see firsthand what hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans deal with daily.
NJ Transit’s rail lines serve about 172,000 riders on a typical weekday, and between 85,000 and 95,000 on a typical weekend day.
On Thursday last week, I rode the Bergen Line, the Morris & Essex Line and the Pascack Valley Line to get the full commuter experience.
15% fare hike
I took the 7:25 a.m. train on the Bergen County Line from the Radburn station in Fair Lawn to Secaucus. The train was not too packed, and commuters said Thursdays are typically less crowded than other days. On the train, I talked to Steven Zharov, a 20-year-old Glen Rock resident who commutes to New York for his accounting internship. Zharov is disappointed at how NJ Transit raised fares.
“One month, I was able to get Flexpasses, and the next month they got rid of it and they raised the prices,” said Zharov, who believes NJ Transit should bring back Flexpass, because “now you either have to buy a monthly ticket or individual ticket.”
Flexpass, which provided 20 one-way tickets between one origin and one destination station at a 20% discount, was discontinued on July 1.
On that day, NJ Transit also increased its ticket prices by 15%, the first rise in fares in nine years and the start of 3% annual fare increases after that. With raised fees, commuters expect NJ Transit to allocate the funds to make improvements.
“I mean, they’re raising our fees all the time, it would be nice to know what the money is going to,” said Sebastian Madrigal, a 30-year-old Summit resident who works for Salesforce.
The increased fares are meant to address the agency’s funding shortages, including a projected $106 million budget gap for the current fiscal year. NJ Transit also identified $96 million in internal cuts and other “efficiencies” to help balance its budget.
The agency is also set to receive about $800 million a year for five years from anew corporate taxpassed by the Legislature in June and originally proposed by Gov. Phil Murphy. The 2.5% tax will be levied on corporations that earn more than $10 millionannually.
The new corporate tax revenue and annual fare increases are supposed to help cover a predicted deficit of about $1 billion the agency was facing for fiscal year 2026.
Lack of NJ Transit communication
I arrived at Penn Station at 8:53 a.m. from Secaucus, then hopped on the 9:23 train out to Summit on the Morris & Essex line. The train was not crowded and ran smoothly, but commuters still had a bone to pick with NJ Transit.
On the way to Summit, I met 27-year-old graduate student Jacob Lipkin, who is from California but lives in Manhattan and commutes to his internship in Montclair. Lipkin said NJ Transit needs to provide better help for commuters to plan their routes.
“I feel like it’s hard to get info. It’s not easy to understand how to plan a route, especially how to combine an NJ Transit rail and bus route,” Lipkin said.
Other commuters had similar complaints.
Elliot Charles, 29, works at Wonder Dog Studio in Summit and has used NJ Transit for the past 10 years. Charles said the arrival times posted on the agency's mobile app and the times the trains actually show up are rarely in sync, and he wishes NJ Transit could be more transparent.
“Whatever you see on the app or whatever’s on the schedule, when they have a time listed I want the train to make it at that exact time and make it where they promised they would be,” Charles said.
Elana Mutnick, a 21-year-old Paramus resident who works at CBS News, agreed. “I would really appreciate getting told when there are delays. For example, if there is a train at 12:50, and it’s still there, I would also like to know on the app that it has not departed so I could make that one,” said Mutnick, whom I met on a different train.
Madrigal, the Summit resident, said service issues are expected, so NJ Transit should own up to them and help commuters with their next steps.
“There’s so many issues so often," Madrigal said. "A little more transparency and communicating that to us so we understand what is going on … perhaps if there’s a way that we can know ahead of time before getting to the train station if something is not going to be functioning so we can plan our days differently.”
NJ Transit President and CEO Kevin Corbett said the agency is figuring out a way to enable better GPS tracking. At the monthly board meeting on July 24,he called it “one of our top priorities.”
Raquel Carcamo, 33, believes communication between NJ Transit and commuters should go deeper than just train times and issue alerts. She is from Nicaragua, lives in New York and works in New Jersey, and hopes NJ Transit can help Spanish-speaking commuters.
“I think that it could help more people who work in the city that speak Spanish if Spanish speakers were working for NJ Transit,” Carcamo said.
Another summer of delays, cancellations
After I got back to Penn Station from Summit, I took the Pascack Valley Line up through Bergen County to its final stop at Spring Valley in Rockland County, New York. I saw multiple commuters miss their stop because they went to the wrong door, or the doors closed too quickly.
Mutnick, who was on the same train, appreciated how empty it was, because of what she and thousands of other commuters dealt with during the heat wave a few weeks ago.
“The heat wave was bad enough, but having to sit in the heat and not being able to do anything about it was brutal," Mutnick said. "And the packed trains just made it worse.”
Many commuters were on trains when overhead NJ Transit and Amtrak wires tangled. Madrigal was one of them.
“The first time that happened to me I had no idea how I was getting home," he said. He found out he could take the PATH to Hoboken and then an NJ Transit train home from there. But many people were trying to board the train at the same time. "People were very frustrated and shoving each other,” Madrigal said.
Zharov, of Glen Rock, has experienced similar issues several times.
“There were a few times that my train had a wire heat up and the lines were broken down," he said. "One time when I got to Hoboken my train had a mechanical error, and I had to wait an hour for the next one.”
Mark Symons, a 42-year-old Ridgewood resident who commutes to Manhattan for his finance job, said that lately the delays in the rail tunnel between Penn Station and Secaucus have been a huge problem. He believes NJ Transit should address those delays immediately and add more multi-level trains.
The $16 billion Gateway program is underway to build a new two-track rail tunnel under the Hudson River and rehabilitate the existing century-old tunnel — which was badly damaged by Superstorm Sandy — where equipment failures often wreak havoc for NJ Transit and Amtrak riders.
While construction has already begun and additional bids are expected to beawarded later this year, the new tunnel is notexpected to be completed until 2035, and the renovation of the older tunnel won't be finished until 2038.
Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner said a new Portal North Bridge spanning the Hackensack River will be done “just a year and a half from now or sooner” and more than 3 miles of wiring is being replaced with that work between Newark and New York.
I left Penn Station at 5:10 p.m. to join the evening rush and got back to my stop in Radburn at 6:18 p.m. Compared with the nightmares I heard from fellow commuters all day, I certainly had a relatively easy day using NJ Transit.
