(The following story by Dan Prochilo appeared on The Montclair Times website on January 9.)
MONTCLAIR, N.J. — In keeping with a state and national upswing in the use of mass transportation, every day between last July and September an average of 400 more rides were taken on Montclair-Boonton Line trains, as compared to the same three-month period in 2006.
The factors that precipitated that rise drove up ridership across the NJ Transit network: “the continued strong economy in the region,” particularly in New York City, and rising gas prices, said NJ Transit spokesman Dan Stessel.
On average, 14,650 people a day boarded Montclair-Boonton Line trains for the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2008, which stretched from last July to September. That was a 2.5 percent increase over the same period the year before.
All told, 900,000 trips were taken during the quarter, also a 2.5 percent jump, NJ Transit spokesman Joe Dee told The Times.
The figures were consistent with those reported last month by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), showing that Americans were increasingly leaving their vehicles in their driveways and flagging down the bus or catching the train, streetcar or trolley.
In a press release, APTA President William W. Millar attributed the rise not only to high gasoline prices, but also to traffic-congestion-fatigue, a condition North Jerseyans know all too well.
According to the APTA, people across the nation took nearly 50 million more trips using public transportation in the third quarter of 2007 than they did during that quarter the previous year.
Millar’s organization singled out the Garden State for having one of the most significant rises in light-rail usage of anyplace in the United States: a 14.1-percent increase, compared to the national 8.9-percent increase in light-rail ridership.
Back on the Montclair-Boonton Line, the increase in trips was most evident when viewing the Midtown Direct service in isolation. The Montclair Connection brought 8,400 people to and from New York’s Penn Station daily, 6.3 percent more than it did a year ago.
“A healthy increase there,” Dee noted.
Since its kickoff in 2002, the Midtown Direct service has grown to account for “well over 50 percent of the total ridership” for the entire line, Stessel added.
By the end of the year, NJ Transit is planning to start offering train service on the weekends along the Montclair-Boonton Line. The new service will be unveiled after renovations — largely being worked on during the weekends — are finished at Newark’s historic Broad Street Station.
Before the new service debuts, NJ Transit has said its representatives will meet with officials from municipalities, including Montclair, through which the trains would roll. That dialogue is to be opened this autumn.
Stessel said it’s impossible to project what the trip statistics would be for that proposed service, since NJ Transit hasn’t decided how many weekend trains there will be or how often they’ll run.
An extra, after-midnight train began departing from New York City on the weekdays starting at the end of last October, Stessel said. Formerly, the last train pulled out of Penn Station at 11:54 p.m., but now another leaves at 12:34 in the morning.
“Customers can stay in Manhattan and take in a show, and still make NJ Transit their travel choice,” Stessel said.
He said that service extension was part of the corporation’s ongoing focus on increasing convenience and accessibility by responding to passenger demand and travel patterns.
The company is also trying to integrate its bus and train schedules to better serve people who are transferring between the two.
As far as accessibility goes, Stessel said NJ Transit is working to ensure its stops and stations have ample parking and clear street signs leading to them, and that its schedules and ticket vending machines are user-friendly.
The publicly subsidized corporation counted a total of 18.9 million train trips statewide during the first quarter of fiscal year 2008.
Coupled with bus and light-rail trips, the number of rides across its network hit 64.4 million, 3.2 percent more trips than the same period last year.
The figure represented NJ Transit’s highest ridership level ever for the first quarter of any fiscal year.