(The following story by Eric Scott Campbell appeared on the Press of Atlantic City website on June 23.)
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — The train line between the resort and Philadelphia has not accompanied other NJ Transit routes in gaining ridership, the organization’s statistics show.
The state’s total rail ridership was up 5.3 percent at the beginning of this year, compared with the Atlantic City line’s 0.8 percent drop, NJ Transit spokesman Joe Dee said.
“In Atlantic City, we haven’t seen the growth we’ve gotten systemwide. … We see a correlation between that trend and changes in the gaming industry,” Dee said, citing the closing of the Sands Casino Hotel and increased competition from other area’s venues, including in Philadelphia.
Since the first quarter of 2007, statistics show Atlantic City line ridership and casino revenue have dipped and crested in tandem, compared with the same quarter in the previous year.
In 2007, casinos for the first time accrued less money than the year before. Revenue fell 7.9 percent this April and rose 1.6 percent in May; NJ Transit does not yet have data from those months available, but passengers interviewed Sunday indicated crowds have not been sparse recently.
New Jersey’s average per-gallon price for regular unleaded gas was about $2.20 in January 2007, then $2.90 this January. As anyone who uses anything gas-powered knows, the state average is about $4 now, and Dee said preliminary indications show the statewide ridership increases are compounding.
“We have anecdotal evidence that the increase in gas prices is convincing customers to either stay with us or to try us for the first time,” said Dee, who added the system has set ridership records in each of the past five years.
Congress this month doubled the federal funding for Amtrak, which reported record ridership in May.
Customers waiting for the hourly train from Atlantic City to Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon said they haven’t had a whole lot of elbow room. Aisha Palorath, of Ventnor, a college student in Philadelphia, has seen bigger crowds on her weekend roundtrips.
Robert Williams has commuted from Egg Harbor City to his Atlantic City job and back every day for 15 years, and he’s seen more and more passengers, even through last year’s price hike. The system raised ticket fees by an average of 9.9 percent on June 1, 2007; Williams said it wasn’t steep enough to warrant complaining.
Some may have complained about what happened five minutes later, when it was announced that would-be train passengers would have to pile into shuttle buses to Absecon, since the train could not pass a stuck-open drawbridge just outside the resort.
That highlighted what refreshment stand clerk Marjorie Meyers called a drawback to the Atlantic City line: It’s only one line, with no connections to other trains east of Philadelphia. She cited that as a potential reason ridership won’t grow.
The state Department of Transportation is studying whether to resurrect a train line from northern Ocean County to just west of Hammonton, and a weekend New York-Atlantic City train service was once expected to begin service in December but now may not start until early 2009.