It’s Rich Sarles
April 2nd 2007 10:24 pm
Well, the even money favorite came in- Rich Sarles is the new Executive Director at NJ Transit. Mr. Sarles is 62, has been the “behind the scenes” man on T.H.E. Tunnel and is a transit professional. The State avoided a long, expensive national search when the right candidate was literally in his office in Newark. Sarles did not get as good a salary deal as his predecessor and his employment agreement has some performance metrics attached to it. The agreement is for one year with the option of annual renewals. General reaction seems to be quite positive. Folks within NJT were glad someone from the outside wasn’t brought in. By promoting Sarles, Gov. Corzine and Kid Kolluri, Esq. signal thier support for T.H.E. Tunnel. At age 62, it would seem to me that this is a 3-5 year stint.
I wish Rich well.
Jishnu Mukerji responded on 03 Apr 2007 at 4:24 pm #
I hope Sarles does not have the antipathy towards EMUs that his predecessor seemed to have. Hopefully he will be able to order multi-voltage automatic switching EMUs even if with a add-on for DMMUs instead of ordering more push-pull cars. It would be nice if he would set himself a goal of accelerating the schedule of all NJT trains by 10% (i.e. 6 minutes on each hour’s worth of running time). This would slowly bring us back to many of the original schedules that existed in the past.
coffeelen responded on 03 Apr 2007 at 7:54 pm #
Jishnu, some excellent ideas & suggestions. We should tabulate these ideas so when we get a chance to meet with Rich, we can review them. I think he would welcome our input.