1. United States
2. N.J.
3. Letter

I’m writing to describe my utmost disappointment and dismay at the current state of NJ transit. I am a resident of Bergen county and have been hybrid commuting to NYC multiple times a week for the past 4 years. Since the beginning of the summer, NJ Transit’s ability to provide reliable, fast, and safe transit has deteriorated. The failures include, but are not limited to multiple train failures in the tunnel to NYC (with some running hours without HVAC, power, or cell service in scorching summer temperatures), incorrectly labeled trains to and from Penn Station + Secaucus, overcrowded platforms, poor wayfinding signage, poor app functionality, no dedicated west-bound bus lane for evening NYC routes, and to top it all off a fare increase. The original set of tunnel failures were chalked up to extreme heat and finger-pointing to Amtrak’s overhead electric system. Yet here we are, in cool autumn weather, still experiencing complete blockage of tunnels nearly weekly if not more frequently. I am a civil engineer and privy to the challenges of infrastructure in this region, however it has come to a point where the excuses are insufficient. I’ve recently spent time in Europe and to say the NJ transit/ Amtrak system is a an embarrassment to US innovation,technology, and engineering is an understatement. These transportation systems are failing every single paying customer and contributing worker of the NY-NJ interface. Moreover, business interests are continuing their pushing returns to office and these are the systems we have in place to use? So once again the worker is left at the bottom with no options but to accept the poor reality of their circumstance and appease the business interest while the government/quasi-government institutions like NJ transit fail. This reality is further exacerbated by the recent fare increase. While I am not an opponent of fare increases, because I am vehemently opposed “starve the beast” approach to public services touted by some politicians as austerity and used to justify privatization of public goods, in light of the system failures, the fare increase is a slap across the face. These transit failures are a municipal issue, they are a county issue, a state issue, a NYC issue, and a federal issue. There needs to be large-scale regional transit planning that brings all parties to the table, provides real and meaningful funding for projects to completed on time and under budget, and for this system to be overhauled from the top down to bring us even remotely close to the 21st century of public transit.