The State of Transportation 2006 -- Reliability of Transit in New Jersey

The State of Transportation 2006

Reliability of Mass Transit

Traffic Congestion

All three of the state's rail systems showed improvement over the period. The condition of NJTransit commuter trains improved by 2 percent from 2001 to 2004, with the number of miles traveled between failures growing to 319,000. However, the year-to-year variability over such a short period makes it difficult to say conclusively that rail reliability is clearly trending to the better.

Sources: FTA. National Transit Database, Revenue Vehicle Maintenance Performance: Details by Transit Agency Directly Operated Service, 2001-2004 and Transit Operating Statistics: Service Supplied and Service Consumed: Details by Transit Agency DO and PT Service, 1997-2004.

Both the PATH and PATCO systems showed even greater improvement, though year-to-year variability again makes it difficult to assess their overall reliability. Importantly, PATH and PATCO trains traveled significantly fewer miles between failures than NJTransit. In 2002, for example, PATH rail service experienced more than 1,200 failures, so that it averaged fewer than 10,000 miles between failures. This could be the result of system repairs and service changes forced by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks which destroyed the World Trade Center PATH station.

Fleet-wide, the system was slightly younger in 2004 than in 2001, with the average railcar age just over 21 years in the most recent year. This is significantly older than FTA guidelines which suggest an average fleet age of 12 to 15 years. It should be noted that the PATH system is in the process of replacing its entire fleet of railcars.

New Jersey's private bus carriers are in better condition now than they were in 2001, with miles traveled between failures growing 37 percent to almost 53,400. But NJTransit buses are in far worse condition, traveling fewer than half as many miles between failures in 2004 as they did in 2001. NJTransit buses experienced a remarkable 11,600 major mechanical failures in 2004, up from 5,125 in 2001. On average, NJTransit buses traveled only 7,400 miles between failures in 2004.

Interestingly, the decline in bus conditions has occurred even as the fleet has grown significantly younger. In 2001, the average NJTransit bus was 9.5 years old. That dropped to 5.6 years in 2004, bringing the state's bus fleet to within the FTA guidelines suggesting a 6-year fleet average. It should be noted, however, that most of the new buses put into service during this period were New York City-bound, not the urban, intra-city buses that serve the majority of New Jersey's bus riders.

NOTE: New Jersey Transit bus reliability data recently provided to the Campaign contradicts the data reported in the federally-maintained National Transit Database used for this report. According to NJTransit, the number of miles traveled between major mechanical failures increased more than 16 percent, from 6,294 in 2001 to 7,315 miles in 2004.

Finally, the Newark Subway system suffered a dramatic decline in reliability, with miles traveled between failures dropping 38 percent from almost 25,300 to about 15,600.