The Case of the Disappearing NJ Transit Trains

No, NJ Transit won't be restoring the late-night service that it failed to inform riders it was cutting last month.

That was the message at the agency's board meeting Wednesday, when some angry passengers accused the agency of making "stealth" service cuts.

Joseph Clift told the board that by his count, "five trains mysteriously disappeared from the schedule without any prior notice."

The agency had notified the public of two proposed late-night train cuts in May. But Clift said the other five were news to him.

They include changes to the Morris and Essex line (last train out of Penn Station now: 12:34 a.m.; prior to the schedule change, it was 1:19 a.m.), the Gladstone Branch (now leaves Hoboken at 11:44 p.m.; formerly 12:34 a.m.), and the North Jersey Coast Line (if you want to go south of Long Branch, you'd better be on the 11:18 p.m. train; wipe that 1 a.m. departure from your memory.)

NJ Transit's executive director, Ronnie Hakim, defended the cuts, saying the agency doesn't have to inform the public of service adjustments when there are fewer than 100 riders per train impacted, or if the adjustment had a smaller-than-two-hours service impact. But that explanation didn't satisfy Clift.

"The argument is that it's a service adjustment," he said. "To me, a service adjustment is a few minutes. To me, this is like saying to Marie Antoinette, 'We're going to make a little height adjustment on you.'"

Faced earlier this year with a $56 million budget gap, NJ Transit unveiled its proposal to raise fares and cut some service at a series of public hearings in May. But as Bloomberg reported last month, the agency didn't disclose the full extent of how late-night train service would be affected.

The NJ Transit board in July voted in favor of fare hikes and service cuts. At the time of that vote, say some riders, the details of the new late-night schedules wasn't known.

"If we had known that we were slated to lose our last trains of the evening," said David Peter Alan, the chair of the Lackawanna Coalition rider's group, "we could have fought to keep those trains, contacted our elected officials...but we could not fight to keep what we were not told that we would lose."

NJ Transit executive director Ronnie Hakim said eliminating those late night trains made sense, because "there were very few people on those trains, and so our ridership did not support the service."

So those late-night trains will not be restored, asked a reporter?

"Correct," said Hakim.