(The following article by Tom Feeney was posted on the Newark Star-Ledger website on October 15.)
NEWARK, N.J. — An upper deck will be added. The dreaded middle seat will be removed. And the tried-and-true strategies of the daily commute will have to be rethought.
NJ Transit will introduce the first of its new double-decker cars on the busy Northeast Corridor line on Dec. 11. The cars will carry more people. They will have more leg room, better lighting and more comfortable seats. The interiors will be a mix of light blue and gray, more soothing than the maroon that dominates most of the cars now in service.
But along with those quality-of-life improvements will come a few changes that will force commuters to make calculations they need not consider on the traditional single-level train cars.
Will it be easier to debark during the rush hours from the top or bottom deck? Will it be better to give up a seat altogether and simply stand on the mezzanine level?
The Comet series cars now in service on most NJ Transit lines have “walk-over” seats that can be changed to face in either direction. On the new cars, half the seats will face in one direction, half in the other.
Commuters will have to decide whether they prefer to face forward during their trip or backward. And they’ll have to figure out where they need to wait on the platform to give them the best shot at the seat they prefer.
“Everybody has their own little preferences and ideas about the best way to ride the trains,” said Lynn Bowersox, NJ Transit’s assistant executive director for external affairs. “We’re all going to have to start over to figure out the best way to ride these.”
Bowersox made those comments last week as she stood on the platform at Penn Station in Newark alongside six of the new rail cars. NJ Transit had brought the cars in to show them off to the media and the public on the day Executive Director George Warrington announced the long-awaited date for the first of the cars to be put into service.
NJ Transit has contracts to buy 234 of the multilevel cars at a cost of more than a half-billion dollars. They will be added gradually to the authority’s fleet between December and late 2008, phasing out the oldest of the Comet models. The double-deckers will eventually represent about a quarter of NJ Transit’s 908 cars.
The double-decker cars will be used only on Manhattan-bound trains. The first nine cars, which already have been delivered, will be used on the Northeast Corridor Line between Trenton and Penn Station in New York.
As additional cars begin arriving at a rate of about seven a month starting next March and 10 a month from July 2007 on, they will be put in service on the Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast lines, as well as on Midtown Direct trains on the Morris & Essex and Montclair-Boonton lines.
“A lot of thought went into them, and I think people are going to notice that,” said Roger Herman, a commuter who served on the 14-person advisory panel that helped design the cars.
Herman said the cars have more storage space, so strollers, luggage and other large items can be kept out of the aisles. They also will have more trash receptacles, better lighting and, from the top deck at least, better views.
The cars are not without their critics. David Peter Alan, the chairman of the Lackawanna Coalition, a rail advocacy group, said he believes NJ Transit made a mistake when it designed cars with half the seats facing in each direction.
He also said the cars feel cramped, and he worries they will cause delays by taking too long to load and unload.
“I don’t see how the advantages of the bilevels could outweigh their disadvantages,” he said.
For NJ Transit officials, the most important advantage of the double-deckers is the added capacity. The new cars will carry 15 and 20 percent more people than the Comet series cars carry. That means a typical set of 10 will be able to carry an extra 225 commuters into or out of Manhattan.
The growing need to get commuters back and forth from the city is the reason for the planned construction of a $7.2 billion trans-Hudson tunnel, a project Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Chairman Anthony Coscia last week called “our generation’s George Washington Bridge.”
That project would more than double the number of trains able to travel beneath the river during rush hour. But even if that tunnel gets approved and funded, it won’t be opened until at least 2016.
While they anticipate a day when they’ll be able to get more trains into Manhattan, NJ Transit officials have embraced the double-decker cars as a way to get more commuters into their Manhattan-bound trains.
“These will allow us to keep up with the growing demand while we wait for the new tunnel to be built,” said Warrington, the NJ Transit executive director.
The first 100 multilevel cars were purchased nearly four years ago for $250 million. That money was provided by the Port Authority.
NJ Transit agreed last summer to buy 131 more cars at a cost of $285 million. The authority borrowed money for that purchase, and the total includes $70 million in interest on the debt and payments to consultants. The debt will be repaid with federal transportation funds.
The manufacturer, Bombardier Transportation, is giving NJ Transit three other cars at no additional cost in exchange for permission to produce the cars at a faster rate than they agreed to in the original contract, said Dan Stessel, a NJ Transit spokesman.
The contract called for the cars to be produced at a rate of seven per month after July 2007. NJ Transit will accept them at a rate of 10 per month instead. The change allows Bombardier to save money by running a faster, more efficient production line, Stessel said.
Eight other multilevel cars will be shipped to NJ Transit. Those will be paid for by a group of Atlantic City casinos. The cars will be part of the Atlantic City Express, a weekend service between Atlantic City and Penn Station in New York that is scheduled to start late next year.
The nine cars that have been delivered to NJ Transit so far have gone through extensive testing already, both at the Transportation Technology Center in Pueblo, Col., and on NJ Transit tracks, said Rich Sarles, the assistant executive director of capital programs.
“They’ve tested out very well,” he said. “There have only been some minor issues, and they have been addressed.”
The next big test will come Dec. 11, when the cars arrive at platforms along the Northeast Corridor Line and commuters begin making their own calculations.