(The Associated Press circulated the following article by Geoff Mulvihill on March 9.)
WEST WINDSOR, N.J. — There seem to be two main questions associated with passenger train lines headed to Manhattan: Are there enough cars for a comfortable ride and how much parking is available at the stations?
Elsewhere in New Jersey, the question is: Who will ride the trains?
As a new Camden-to-Trenton River Line light rail prepares for its debut on Sunday, the story of commuter rails in New Jersey is a tale of two cities. And those cities include neither Trenton nor Camden.
“You cannot have enough one-seat rides into Manhattan,” said David Johnson, a transportation associate at the Washington-based National Association of Railroad Passengers.
Meanwhile, the main New Jersey-to-Philadelphia line has lost riders from its peak at the end of the 1990s.
The basic reason for the contrast in transit pictures is this: More than 252,000 New Jersey residents worked in Manhattan, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. The same year, 71,600 worked in Philadelphia. The Manhattan number was 10 percent higher than it was a decade earlier, the Philadelphia number was 4 percent lower.
While most of New Jersey’s 3.9 million residents who work do so in New Jersey, those who don’t face a particular challenge. Getting to Philadelphia or New York City from the Garden State involves crossing a river via bridge, tunnel or ferry. And driving often means bottlenecks at bridges and tunnels.
For those working in New York – even those with cars – public transit is often a big part of life.
When Allen Boston moved from Maryland 17 years ago, he settled in West Windsor for two main reasons: a good school system and easy access to the Princeton Junction train station, which has direct service to Manhattan. That’s where he works when he’s not traveling for his job.
Boston, an accountant, said his life is centered around the train. He said he’s met most of his New Jersey friends – including golfing partners – on the train.
“It gives me a place to read the paper and do work,” Boston said as he walked the three-tenths of a mile from the closest available parking spot to the station one morning this month.
At Princeton Junction, which serves five New York-bound trains an hour during the morning rush, the snack shop is gourmet.
It’s a little different on NJ Transit’s Atlantic City Line. At the Cherry Hill station on that route, the closest thing to a snack shop is the supermarket the station sits behind.
Unlike the trains headed to New York, the one that runs between Atlantic City and Philadelphia is largely unknown.
Just two Philadelphia-bound trains stop at the Cherry Hill station during the prime commuting hours between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. The ride from Cherry Hill to 30th Street station takes 30 minutes.
One morning last week, a few dozen passengers got on the 7:46 train.
For some, the train was a late discovery.
Dennis DeTurck, 49, a math professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has lived in Cherry Hill about as long as Boston has been in West Windsor.
But he began taking the train to work only last year when his son, a high school senior, began driving to school.
“I found an hour of my day,” he said – time he used recently to grade a calculus exam.
DeTurck said that even when his son goes off to college next fall and relinquishes his claim to the car, he’ll continue to take the train to work.
Because it serves West Philadelphia rather than Center City, the Atlantic City line isn’t a prime option for many commuters.
Far more Philadelphia-bound commuters use the PATCO Speedline from the suburbs of southern New Jersey. But officials at the Delaware River Port Authority say the 35-year-old line is losing passengers, partly because jobs are not where they used to be.
The employment center in Center City Philadelphia has shifted a few blocks to the west, making it a longer walk from the PATCO stations in the city, said Bob Box, the PATCO general manager. And, Box said, there’s less concentration of jobs in Philadelphia and more in suburban office complexes far from train lines.
The Delaware River Port Authority, which runs PATCO, is studying whether it would make sense to build a new train line through Gloucester County – one of the fastest-growing parts of the Philadelphia area and home to a notorious traffic jams on Route 42.
While transportation officials in southern New Jersey are trying to figure out whether more lines might be viable, NJ Transit has a pretty clear picture of what works in the northern part of the state. The Midtown Direct service that opened in 1996 on the Essex-Morris line is credited with making towns such as Maplewood and South Orange among the state’s hottest real estate markets.
The priority there, Warrington said, is getting more trains into Manhattan.
“We run almost 200 trains a day at peak periods to and from New York,” said George D. Warrington, executive director of New Jersey Transit, the state agency responsible for all but two of the state’s commuter rail systems. “If you go back 10 years, we ran fewer than 100. Clearly, the market has exploded.”
NJ Transit’s top priority project, Warrington said, is building another tunnel under the Hudson River so even more trains from the Garden State can get into New York.