(The following story by Rudy Larini appeared on the Star-Ledger website on August 14.)
NEWARK, N.J. — Rail ridership is growing at a record clip as high gasoline prices convince more and more motorists to turn off their car engines and hop on a train.
Yesterday, NJ Transit addressed the increase by adding another 50 multi-level rail cars to its growing fleet, raising passenger capacity by 13,000 seats during peak commuting hours.
Executive Director Richard Sarles said the agency’s bus and rail ridership is growing at a rate of about 5 percent “on the steady march to one million trips per day systemwide.” Even weekend use of trains is up, he said, hitting a record 104,000 passenger trips on Saturday, July 12.
NJ Transit began purchasing multi-level cars from Bombardier Transportation of Canada in 2002; the latest acquisition brings the total number of cars on order to 329. Sarles said he expects all of them to be in service by the spring of 2010 when they will comprise about a third of the agency’s rail fleet.
The cars were introduced on the Northeast Corridor line in December 2006 and are now also in service on the North Jersey Coast Line, Midtown Direct trips on the Morris & Essex Lines and Montclair-Boonton lines and most recently, the Raritan Valley Line. The new cars will be distributed among these lines.
The agency has received 170 of the cars and Sarles said that on any given day 143 are in service.
“We wanted to see how the passenger growth went and have the ability to order more cars,” Sarles said. “We’re going to watch the ridership and if it continues to grow, we can order some more.
“This solves the problem for a while,” he said, though adding the ultimate solution to NJ Transit’s passenger capacity needs will be a new rail tunnel into Manhattan, the so-called Access to the Region’s Core plan that comes with a price tag now in excess of $9 billion.
The increase in mass transit ridership comes at a time when the use of cars is declining.
Americans drove 12.2 billion fewer miles in June than in the same month a year earlier, the Federal Highway Administration said yesterday. The 4.7 percent decline, which came as gas prices were peaking, was the biggest monthly driving drop in a downward trend that began in November.
Overall, Americans drove 53.2 billion fewer miles from November through June than they did over the same eight-month period a year earlier, according to the highway agency’s latest monthly report on driving. That’s a larger decline than the 49.3 billion fewer miles driven by Americans over the entire decade of the 1970s, a period marked by oil embargoes and gas lines, the agency said.
Meanwhile, more travelers are turning to trains. From May to July, NJ Transit rail ridership grew 4.6 percent over the same period last year.
Yesterday, Sarles accompanied Gov. Jon Corzine and state Transportation Commissioner Kris Kolluri on a trip from Trenton to New Brunswick aboard a multi-level train and said the spacious cars with two-passenger, side-by-side seating and added leg room were well-received by passengers they met.
“We got a lot of favorable comments from people,” Sarles said at yesterday’s NJ Transit board meeting where the $76 million purchase of the 50 new cars was approved.
In other business yesterday, NJ Transit approved an early retirement incentive program for its administrative, non-union employees, a move expected to save the agency some $6 million in this year’s budget. From next month until December, retiring employees will have three years added to their years of service for purposes of calculating pension benefits. Sarles said he expects about 70 employees to take advantage of the program.
“Every year we’re trying to contain our costs. This is another tool to be able to contain costs and actually reduce costs,” Sarles said. “This is good management in my book.”