New Jersey residents benefit from an extensive mass transit network, with rail and/or bus service accessible to a majority of residents and worksites. But large areas of the state lack service. Some of the counties experiencing the fastest population and employment growth in the state, such as Somerset, Ocean and Warren have the least transit service. Importantly, the presence of a rail station or bus stop is only one measure of transit access. If service is infrequent, or doesn’t travel to the destinations residents and workers need to reach, living and working near a transit stop does not equate with having access to transit service.
Only a small fraction of New Jersey’s residents live in a area with a NJTransit, PATCO or PATH rail station nearby. Just three percent of residents live in a Census block group (the smallest geographical unit of analysis, typically containing between 600 and 3,000 people, with an ideal size of 1,500 people) with a rail station. However, park-and-ride lots mean that rail service is accessible to far more residents than just those living within walking distance of a station (catchment areas tend to average between 3 and 5 miles).
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Source: NJTransit, Rail and Bus System Map, 2004. |
An even smaller share of New Jersey job sites are located near rail stations. Just 1.4 percent of New Jersey workers work in a Census tract with a rail station, though a large number of New Jersey commuters work in Philadelphia or New York City, both with significant rail service.
Census Tracts, however, can be quite large geographic areas covering dozens of square miles. (The Census describes tracts as "small, relatively permanent statistical subdivisions of a county." They usually contain between 2,500 and 8,000 persons.) The presence of a rail station in a Census Tract therefore does not necessarily indicate transit accessibility. Census Block Groups provide a more accurate way to assess transit accessibility, but workplace data was not available for all block groups in the state.
A larger share of New Jersey residents and workers had access to NJTransit bus service. Fifty-four percent of residents live in a block group with at least one NJTransit bus stop. And 81 percent of workers work in a Census tract with at least one bus stop (though the use of Census tracts has significant limitations, as discussed above).