NJ Transit’s frequent delays enrage commuters as 15% fare hike set to take hold — and ‘nothing is being done about it’
Every day, radio producer Brandon Tagoe hops on an early-morning train from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Manhattan’s Penn Station.
The short ride is supposed to give him more than enough time to get to his New York City “dream job” by 5:15 a.m. But Tagoe, 28, said New Jersey Transit’s recent string of problems and delays have made him chronically late — and that hasn’t put him in his boss’s good graces.
“I had to be spoken to,” Tagoe lamented as he stood at Penn Station last week. “I had a meeting with my boss about the importance of being on time, and he has been threatened with repercussions if it continues.”
“It happens so often,” he said of the delays. “And nothing is being done about it.”
NJT has frustrated its riders for years. But a series of holdups, slowdowns and outright cancellations in June — combined with aging train cars, ancient infrastructure and an ironically timed 15% fare hike that starts Monday — has left commuters who make the punishing journey from the Garden State to Manhattan fuming with little hope it’ll 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 am paying $200 monthly, they’re telling me it’s going up, but yet the service is still terrible.
“I can’t be late all the time,” she continued. “I’ve gotten written up for being late. My job is all about getting there on time, and I don’t want to be out of a job.”
Talia Crawford, advocacy and organizing manager for the New York-based Tri-State Transportation Campaign, said many of the problems stem from years’ worth of financial shortfalls and budgetary neglect — even though the agency was allocated an eye-watering $2.9 billion in 2023.
“New Jersey Transit has been in a budget deficit for the past 10 years — and we’re almost in a billion-dollar hole,” she said last week.
But pushing more money into the agency’s coffers is hard, since it’s vying for the same dollars as every other state-funded department in New Jersey.
“Transportation is up against, like, education and hospitals and other public utilities,” Crawford said. “I don’t think it’s gotten as much backing as it has now, because we realize how critical public transportation is, and how many people really use it.”
The results of that chronic underfunding were on full display over the last few weeks, when already-frustrated commuters endured a series of nightmare delays caused by problems with Amtrak’s overhead wires, electrical and mechanical issues with NJT trains, a wild brush fire in the Meadowlands and a blown circuit breaker that cut power between the stations in Newark and Midtown.
In a statement last week, NJT President and CEO Kevin Corbett said he hears riders’ complaints.
“We are as frustrated as our customers, and the frequency and impact these issues are having 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 spate of incidents affecting the Northeast Corridor.
“What we can say is that we operate approximately 700 trains every weekday along hundreds of miles of track, on 11 rail lines, with the same equipment. And these incidents are mainly occurring on just this one stretch of track on the [Northeast Corridor] between Newark and New York,” he said.
Amtrak — which owns the infrastructure, and charges NJT about $200 million per year to send its trains back and forth to New York — also acknowledged problems on the lines.
In a June 21 letter to customers, Amtrak President Roger Harris apologized to “everyone who was inconvenienced” by the avalanche of issues, and said the problems appeared to be “unique to the equipment and area.”
“We have established 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 issues, there is some help on the horizon.
An NJ Transit spokesperson said the agency will soon receive 138 brand-new, multilevel train cars that will be much more reliable than others in the aging fleet. Some of these 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% tax hike on the state’s largest corporations — the proceeds of which would go directly to closing NJT’s nearly billion-dollar budget gap, according to Politico.
“You saw the drama that played out in New York City, in New York State, with the MTA, where they were going to rely on third parties, essentially, to solve their fiscal challenge in the transit system,” the governor said, referencing the Big Apple’s failed congestion pricing plan.
“All of us committed that we wanted to solve our problems within our four walls, and sometimes that’s not pain-free.”
Then there’s the $16 billion Hudson Tunnel Project, which will build a new, two-track rail tunnel between the 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 about 450 trains every day during the week.
That might lessen the eternal sting 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 move was “the biggest policy mistake of the past 50 years in New Jersey.”
Of course, commuters might not want to hold their breath waiting for the new rail lines — the Hudson tunnels won’t open until 2035, and the North River passages won’t be fixed until 2038.
Crawford, the transit advocate, said New Jersey’s corporate tax boost — which is expected to bring in about $800 million annually — will help keep NJT afloat, but won’t fix it.
“This would just get them out of the hole,” she said. “It doesn’t address any of the service issues and improvements that NJ Transit needs. And it won’t add service.”
Still, it’s the first time the state is investing in public transportation like the necessary utility that it is, she said. And that must be continued.
“It should be prioritized and funded in the future … for riders to really see the changes that we need and want,” she said.
In the meantime, Amtrak and NJT officials jointly announced last week they’ll boost inspections and maintenance work on a “variety of infrastructure and fleet systems” following the recent spate of service disruptions.
“This will be a holistic effort focused on both Amtrak infrastructure — including the electric traction system that powers trains, the catenary (the system of overhead power wires that are part of the electric traction system), signals, and switches — and NJ TRANSIT equipment, including the pantograph system that connects to the catenary and draws power for the train,” the agencies said in a joint statement.
Riders, for their part, have little faith in the agency. And even less hope that things will get better.
“There are a lot of issues they have to work on to improve service,” said Dalbert Artiles, a lab technician who takes NJT from Manhattan’s Penn Station to his job in New Brunswick.
“It’s not going to get better anytime soon,” he continued. “I’m expecting it to get worse — and I’m worried about it.”
