(The following article by Joe Malinconico was posted on the Newark Star-Ledger website on June 10.)
NEWARK, N.J. — After two years of declines, the ridership on NJ Transit’s trains, buses and subways has begun to rise, a trend officials attribute to the region’s rebounding economy.
The turnaround is most pronounced on bus and train routes into New York City, where the number of riders has climbed by 3.3 percent during the first nine months of the fiscal year that started July 2003, according to statistics released yesterday.
Overall, NJ Transit’s passenger numbers increased by about 2.2 percent over that same time period.
“Transit ridership tends to track closely with job growth in the region,” said state Transportation Commissioner Jack Lettiere.
“That’s a very good sign of the state’s economic recovery,” said Joel Weiner, executive director of the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority, an agency that oversees some of the funding for mass transit and highways. “I think there are a lot of underlying factors at work.”
Weiner cited the reopening of the World Trade Center PATH station, the opening of the massive Secaucus Junction rail station and the debut of the light rail line in South Jersey as some of the things that would have boosted ridership.
“Over that time, you’ve also had gasoline prices creeping up,” Weiner said. “That might have caused some commuters to shift.”
The extra passengers have paid about $1 million more in fares than NJ Transit officials had expected to collect over the first three quarters of the current fiscal year.
During the 1990s, increases in ridership had become routine. The number of passengers on the state’s mass transit system grew by about 40 percent over the decade.
But the region’s economic troubles — which were worsened by the 9/11 terrorist attacks — caused train, bus and subway ridership to drop by 4 percent a year from 2001 to 2003.
NJ Transit Executive Director George Warrington yesterday discussed what he considered some highlights of the increase:
# The Main, Bergen and Pascack Valley rail lines — which benefited from Secaucus Junction by getting connecting trains into Manhattan — had a 10 percent increase in riders.
# The buses to New York that run along Route 9 in Monmouth and Middlesex counties saw a 3 percent rise in passengers, compared with 1 percent for the overall bus system.
# The Newark City subway registered an 11 percent increase in its passenger loads.
“That’s not a surprise at all,” said Newark Business Administrator Richard Monteilh. “We’ve had jobs moving into the city, and we want those numbers to continue to grow.”
As its ridership numbers creep up, NJ Transit continues to juggle its rail equipment to meet the changing demand. That shifting, however, has been complicated by the agency’s ongoing difficulties getting delivery of new rail passenger cars from Alstom Transport.
The French company has had financial problems and is more than a year late delivering the final 45 Comet V cars in a 265-car shipment costing New Jersey $273 million.
The firm also is running about 90 days behind schedule building 33 diesel locomotives for NJ Transit, Warrington said. The replacement engines are due at the end of this year under a $146 million contract.
Meanwhile, transit officials continue to spend more money on their legal battles over cost overruns involving the $1.1 billion South Jersey light rail system.
The agency’s board of directors yesterday approved a $1.9 million increase in fees for Sills, Cummis, Radin, Tischman, Epstein and Gross, the Newark law firm defending NJ Transit in a suit filed by the system’s builder, Rail Group LLC. The contract extension approved yesterday brings the total for legal fees to $5.9 million, and the case remains in the investigative stage, officials said.
The extra $1.9 million should cover legal expenses in the case through the end of the year, officials said.