(The following article by Tom Feeney was posted on the Newark Star-Ledger website on October 23.)
NEWARK, N.J. — When the electronic board at Washington’s Union Station finally flashed the track number where the Baltimore-bound 5:25 p.m. MARC train would board, a crowd of several hundred commuters surged toward the platform.
As they boarded, they faced a choice that will confront increasing numbers of New Jersey commuters starting in December: upstairs or down?
NJ Transit officials can only hope double-decker cars are as popular with commuters here as they are with the commuters in Maryland.
The Maryland Transit Authority began running the cars on the busiest of its three regional rail lines in 2001. They’ve been so popular with commuters that conductors on the line sometimes hear complaints when they pull alongside a platform in a traditional single-level train. In the “frequently asked questions” section of their Web site, MTA officials felt the need to offer an explanation for why they have to run the single-level cars at least some of the time.
“They had me from ‘no middle seat,'” said Kathleen Porter-Davis, who commutes between her home in Anne Arundel County, Md., and her job at a Washington, D.C., bank. “Really, as long as the middle seat is gone, I’m a fan.”
The single-level cars on the MARC lines, like the traditional single-level Comet cars NJ Transit runs, have three seats on one side of the aisle — a window seat, an aisle seat and a middle seat. That third seat in the middle might as well be a third rail. Commuters in Maryland, like commuters in New Jersey, don’t want to touch it.
Porter-Davis said getting stuck in the middle seat used to ruin her commute. She hated squeezing past the person on the aisle seat, hated having to ask people to pick up their briefcases and purses so she could sit down and hated wedging herself between complete strangers for the 28-minute trip.
The multilevel cars the MTA runs, like the ones NJ Transit will run, have only two seats on each side of the aisle. Each of the two dozen commuters interviewed at Union Station during an evening rush last week had positive opinions of the cars. All but one of those commuters identified the missing middle seat as the best feature.
The first nine of NJ Transit’s 234 multilevel cars will begin service on the busy Northeast Corridor Line on Dec. 11. The rest will arrive at a rate of seven or 10 a month starting in March 2007 and continuing until the order is complete in 2008.
The cars on the Maryland lines are not identical to the ones NJ Transit will use. The Maryland cars were built by Kawasaki, an unsuccessful bidder for the NJ Transit contract. NJ Transit’s trains are being built by the Canadian firm Bombardier.
The NJ Transit trains are a foot shorter from rail to roof but the ceiling height inside is about the same — 6 feet, 4 inches. Taller commuters have to stoop as they walk down the aisles. If taller commuters have to stand, the ceilings on the mezzanine levels are about six inches higher.
Just as they will on the NJ Transit cars, half of the riders on the MARC trains face backward during the trip. The single-level NJ Transit cars have “walk-over” seats that can be flipped over to face in either direction.
“Riding backward is not a big thing,” said Walter Chew, who commutes between suburban Baltimore and Washington, D.C. “I don’t even really notice it, especially when it’s dark outside.”
The single-level MARC cars do not have walk-over seats, either, so Chew and other commuters were riding backward before the multilevel trains arrived.
The interior of the MARC cars is a placid shade of blue similar to the one NJ Transit will use in its cars. The seats, a mix of fabric and vinyl, show signs of wear and dirt.
Dan Stessel, a spokesman for NJ Transit, said the people who designed the agency’s multilevel cars — a group that included a panel of commuters — looked closely at the experiences of MARC and other transit agencies for ideas on how to design and operate them. One of the things the commuter advisory panel decided after studying the other agencies’ trains was that all-vinyl seats would be easier to keep clean, he said.
The MARC commuters who spilled into the Baltimore-bound 5:25 p.m. train filled the forward- and backward-facing seats at about the same rate.
The top and bottom decks also filled at about the same rate. If one deck is more popular than the other, it wasn’t apparent.
Like MARC, the Virginia Railway Express runs multilevel trains to and from Union Station every day. The agency’s spokesman, Mark Roeber, said the cars have been very popular with its riders, too.
“We run a very scenic route, so tourists and first-time riders tend to flock to the seats on the top level because of the view,” Roeber said.
Daily riders tend to make decisions based on where their friends sit, he said.
One thing that was clear from watching the MARC trains fill up was that the seats in the mezzanine level are the least popular. The mezzanine level consists of small areas at either end of the car where commuters enter and exit the train. Most of the people who were forced to stand did so there, making that the most crowded area of the cars. And when the train approached a station, riders on the top and bottom levels walked down to the mezzanine to be nearer the door, making the crowding even worse.
MTA runs a much smaller regional rail operation than NJ Transit, providing 20,000 passenger trips per weekday compared with NJ Transit’s 72,000. But the rush-hour trains that run out of Union Station toward Maryland are every bit as full as the NJ Transit trains that run out of Penn Station in New York. The trains have eight cars, and all of them are packed enough that many riders are forced to stand.
Some commuter groups in New Jersey have expressed fear that the trains will take longer to load and unload because people will have to make a decision to go upstairs or down.
That did not appear to be a problem on the MARC trains. The cars loaded and unloaded at about the same rate as the single-level cars.
“Most people get in the habit of sitting upstairs or downstairs,” Chew said. “There’s no need to stop to think about it.”