(The following article by Tom Feeney was posted on the Newark Star-Ledger website on January 19.)
NEWARK, N.J. — Commuters flocked to NJ Transit trains by the thousands when the Sept. 11 attacks disrupted PATH service to Lower Manhattan and kept riding even after PATH went back on line more than two years later.
The ridership surge forced NJ Transit to find ways to deliver more people to Midtown Manhattan years earlier than it would have if not for the cataclysm, according to an analysis of the agency’s ridership growth released by a Rutgers University think tank yesterday.
“The system is operating at considerable stress,” said Martin Robins, a senior fellow at the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center. “It’s like a rubber band that is constantly being stretched.”
Before 9/11, 45 percent of the Manhattan-bound riders on NJ Transit’s regional rail lines traveled into New York’s Penn Station, the study found. The rest switched from the regional rail lines to PATH trains in Newark or Hobo ken.
The share of riders traveling to Penn Station New York, rather than getting off in Newark or Hoboken, grew to 58 percent shortly after the attack and remained there even after the World Trade Center PATH station reopened in November 2003.
That percentage increase represents a growth of more than 10,000 riders into Penn Station during morning rush hour.
“Transit agencies don’t behave that way ordinarily,” Robins said. “It’s a very incremental business where things usually happen a little bit at a time.”
NJ Transit has long planned for incremental ridership growth associated with the forecast growth in the number of jobs in Midtown, near Penn Station, according to James P. Redeker, assistant executive director of policy, technology and customer services. The terrorist attacks greatly accelerated the change.
Before 9/11, 70 percent of all New Jersey commuters traveling into Manhattan every day on all modes of transportation headed to Midtown and 30 percent headed to Lower Manhattan, the Voorhees report found. Immediately after the terrorist attack, the proportion shifted to 90 percent and 10.
The attack destroyed or damaged 35 million square feet of Class A office space in Lower Manhattan, displacing 114,000 workers. Just under half of those workers re turned to Lower Manhattan by July 2002. About 25,000 of the displaced workers relocated to Midtown, according to the report.
“The shift was more than we ex pected sooner than what would have happened naturally,” Redeker said.
The Voorhees report identified a series of steps the transit agency took to respond to the increased demand, some of them invisible to the riding public, Robins said.
The agency transferred locomo tives and cars onto the Northeast Corridor, North Jersey Coast and Midtown Direct lines. The retirement of the Comet I cars in NJ Transit’s fleet was put off. Amtrak, which owns the Northeast Corri dor, agreed to let NJ Transit boost the number of trains it runs between New Jersey and Penn Station New York from 19 per hour to 23.
Those and other changes enabled the agency to meet the new demand caused by 9/11, but they will not be sufficient to keep up with the continued growth in demand for service to Midtown, Robins warned.
The demand is forecast to grow by 27 percent over the next 20 years. The multilevel rail cars being introduced by NJ Transit this year and next will help meet some of the demand, but the completion of the planned $7.2 billion trans-Hudson tunnel will be critical, Robins said.