(The following article by Ronald Smothers was posted on the New York Times website on April 21.)
NEWARK, N.J. — New Jersey Transit railroad and bus fares will increase an average of 11.5 percent under a plan approved on Thursday by the transit agency’s board.
The increase, to go into effect in July, is the second in 14 years for the system’s 380,000 daily riders. The agency staff’s original recommendation, made in January, had been for an increase of 15 percent to close a projected $60 million gap in New Jersey’s Transit’s $1.4 billion budget for 2006. At the time, Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey expressed concern about such an increase and pressed the board and staff to find ways to make it less drastic.
The executive director of New Jersey Transit, George D. Warrington, said the increase would cover $48 million of the projected budget gap, while other measures, like freezing the salaries of senior managers, leaving staff vacancies unfilled and increasing sources of ad and leasing revenues, would produce the remaining $12 million.
Mr. Codey was pleased with the steps the agency had taken, said Kelley Heck, his spokeswoman.
“It is never good news to have to do a fare increase,” she said, “but all things considered, transit has done a good job in keeping the amount of the increase down.”
The fare increases come as New Jersey Transit, the nation’s third-largest public transit agency by ridership, struggles with a longstanding problem. Annual state operating subsidies have remained essentially unchanged, which has required the regular diversion of funds intended for capital investment to keep fares from rising out of control. State transportation officials and advocates for mass transit have been pressing for structural changes in both operating and capital financing, but find elected officials reluctant to face the political perils of increasing taxes or dedicating new taxes for mass transit.
The effects of the increase approved on Thursday will vary according to when and how people travel.
Commuters on rail lines and buses going into and out of New York and Philadelphia will be hit with an average 9.9 percent increase. But off-peak round-trip riders will feel a greater pinch because their discount, now 25 percent, will shrink to 15 percent. One-way bus fares for those traveling one intrastate zone will rise to $1.25 from $1.10, and fares for two-zone travel to $1.95 from $1.70. One-way fares on the light rail systems serving Hudson and Bergen Counties and Newark and Camden will rise to $1.25 from $1.10. But the cost of monthly passes for the light rail lines and intrastate buses will stay the same.
Mr. Warrington said that the transit agency sought to minimize the effect on the system’s regular customers when determining the fare increases. This partly explains the increase’s disproportionate impact on off-peak travelers, whom he called “incidental” riders.
But that approach was condemned as “seriously flawed” by David P. Alan, president of the Lackawanna Coalition, one of the mass transit advocacy groups that opposed the increases. Arguing that these “discretionary” off-peak riders represented the growth potential of rail ridership, he said:
“It is manifestly and inherently unfair to cause one class of riders to pay two and half times more of an increase than others. This will discourage off-peak travel, and what will follow is cuts in those services.”