NJ Transit travel times
March 18th 2007 01:41 pm
Today’s NY Times has a rather lengthy article on regional rail fares in the NJ/NY/CT area. It’s accompanied by an interesting graphic showing evening peak period travel times from NYC in a map format. One of the things that’s not discussed often is NJ Transit’s lengthening of travel times over the years.
I made an intra-state commute to work via NJ Transit rail throughout the 1990’s. What ultimately led me to give up on riding the train and to drive to work was the significant increase in rail travel time. Between the early-1990’s and now, the round-trip travel time for my commute increased by 52 minutes. Yes, I’d spend an extra 52 minutes on trains each day to get to and from work now compared to 15 years ago. I don’t know how you would feel about that, but it was a deal-breaker for me.
Perhaps my commute was the unusual one. It involved taking two different NJ Transit rail lines. But my feeling is that travel times system-wide have increased significantly over the years. It also seems that express trains are an endangered species on NJ Transit.
coffeelen responded on 20 Mar 2007 at 8:55 pm #
Agreed. I just noticed on the new 4/1/07 schedule that the 7:30 A.M. MidTown Direct out of Chatham which now leaves at 7:30 A.M. and gets to NY Penn at 8:16 A.M. will now be leaving Chatham at 7:28 A.M. and still be getting to NY Penn at 8:16 A.M. We just added 2 minutes. Wait til the bi-levles.
John 76 responded on 21 Mar 2007 at 3:18 pm #
I read the same article, Bob. One important point is that the NJT commuters there are the greater the losses since NJT loses money on its commuter operations.
I believe this problem is rooted in your experience. Commuters within the state often are reverse communters and, even when they are not, get off the train short of NYP so their seat cn be used twice. This is very profitable for NJT. However NJT treats commuters within the state as second class citizens which tends to discourage them from riding. NJT will never make money as long as it is a one way operation only and is constantly hauling empty trains around. What NJT needs to do is to fill up those empty seats. I can’t see that NJT even sees the problem much less is trying to do anything about it.
Jishnu Mukerji responded on 24 Mar 2007 at 11:50 am #
NJT is apparently not given any specific goals for maintaining or improving trip times. They apparently are given a goal to maintain or improve On Time Performance (OTP). The easiest way to increase the probability of being on time is to stretch out the schedule, and that is what they do. It is time to set specific trip time goals for each route and stopping patterns so that NJT has a basis for then setting up a balanced scorecard based on the two seemingly conflicting goals and make rational decisions to produce and operate a schedule that optimizes on trip time and OTP both. Doing so should immediately have significant impact on choice of equipment and operating procedures. What they already have in place of course cannot be changed immediately, but future decisions should be impacted by such a change in priorities.
Bob Scheurle responded on 24 Mar 2007 at 4:58 pm #
Excessive padding in the schedule does not improve on-time performance. I’ll give you an example:
When I was a regular rider, there was one train that was 5 minutes late every day. Yes, every day. The engineer deliberately went as slow as he could and still arrive at the end of the run within the 6-minute on-time window. Since the train was 5 minutes late every day, NJT added 5 minutes to the schedule. Guess what? The train was still 5 minutes late every day! The engineer simply went even slower, but still within the on-time window.
So it can be shown that padding schedules does not necessarily improve on-time performance.
About the only time excessive padding helps is when there are service disruptions, as the trains have that much more time to get to their destinations and still be counted as on-time. So the end result is that everyone’s trip is delayed every day just to accomodate the exceptional condition.
As they say, is that any way to run a railroad?