(The following story by Thomas Barlas appeared on the Press of Atlantic City website on September 18.)
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — NJ Transit’s Atlantic City Rail Line set another record for passenger trips during fiscal year 2007, breaking the previous fiscal year record by about 100,000 passenger trips.
Passengers took about 1.3 million trips on the line that stretches between the Atlantic City Rail Terminal and 30th Street Station in Philadelphia.
This marked the fourth consecutive year the line posted a ridership record, in part because of more marketing campaigns, partnerships with casinos to provide promotional incentives and targeting of some groups in Philadelphia who enjoy going to the gaming halls, NJ Transit spokesman Dan Stessel said.
Also helping ridership is that riders are getting to and from their destinations more comfortably: NJ Transit has completed a year-long transition of replacing its Comet 3 passenger cars – which were built in 1990 – with more comfortable and mechanically reliable Comet 4 passenger cars, which were built around 1996. The Comet 4 cars came from other NJ Transit lines that got newer cars, such as the deluxe bi-level coaches running on the Northeast Corridor Line between Trenton and New York City.
In fiscal year 2008, Stessel said NJ Transit plans to better coordinate bus and rail service connected with the Atlantic City Line. The goal is to make tighter connections between bus and train service, he said.
That coordination of bus and train service connected with the Atlantic City Line is already a model that NJ Transit will use to better coordinate bus and train service connected to its other rail lines, he said.
Overall, NJ Transit ridership set new all-time highs for the system in fiscal year 2007, with average weekday ridership reaching 865,000 trips on the agency’s bus, rail and light rail lines. NJ Transit posted a record 251 million trips, or 4.1 percent more than fiscal year 2006.
NJ Transit’s fiscal year runs from July 1 to June 30.