NJ Transit Is NYC’s Least Reliable Commuter Rail — By a Long Shot

New Jersey Transit, the commuter rail serving New York City for the state, has a reputation for frustrating delays and frequent cancellations. An analysis of real-time train data shows that it is less reliable than its New York and Connecticut counterparts — Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) — and riders face significant service disruptions at six times the rate of other commuters.

About one in every 18 NJ Transit trains was delayed by at least 15 minutes or canceled completely in May, June and July. For an average commuter, that meant a bad commute roughly every two weeks, versus once every three months or more on the more reliable lines to New York and Connecticut suburbs.

Monday, June 23 was one of the most challenging afternoons for NJ Transit riders. A combination of an Amtrak signal issue, a brushfire, and mechanical problems led to 28 delays of 15 minutes or longer and 15 cancellations for trains departing the city. Only half of NJ Transit trains in that direction were on time that evening.

Commuters on the other two New York City-area railroads, which don’t rely on Amtrak’s infrastructure or an aging fleet, mostly got to their destinations as scheduled. Metro-North had only three delays of 30 minutes or longer, due to track work on the Hudson line. The LIRR had none. Neither railroad canceled any trains.

NJ Transit, Metro-North, and the LIRR are crucial arteries into Manhattan, moving hundreds of thousands of commuters into the Financial District and Midtown every day. As New York City faces a housing affordability crisis, the railroads are critical to the city’s future as the region seeks to build more densely near train stops.

Two of those railroads, Metro-North and the LIRR, post on-time rates above 96 percent almost every month. These railroads are run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which also operates the city’s subways and buses, and is funded largely from fares and dedicated taxes.

NJ Transit is different. It has been beholden to the New Jersey governor and state legislature for funding, Amtrak for much of its key infrastructure, and the federal government for major infrastructure upgrades. It has run less reliably in extreme weather, especially heat, partly because of shortcomings with Amtrak infrastructure.

The agency publishes high-level performance metrics on a data dashboard, reporting the total number of trains delayed by more than six minutes and total number of cancellations per month. But to the weary office worker trying to get home to her family, there is a world of difference between a seven- and 70-minute delay, a difference the agency’s public reporting obscures. Metro-North and the LIRR, by contrast, publish information about every delayed and canceled train, including duration and cause, going back to 2012.

To understand the frequency of significant delays on New York commuter lines, Bloomberg tracked more than 190,000 trains this summer using live transit feeds, the kind used by navigation apps such as Google Maps. Overall, the delays in this data matched each agency’s reported on-time statistics within 1 percentage point. Bloomberg also collected every service alert issued by the three railroads during the same time frame.

The results show NJ Transit riders had more issues than their New York and Connecticut counterparts, particularly with the number of trains delayed more than 30 minutes. NJ Transit had more than 1,000 trains delayed more than a half hour over the summer, compared to about 300 for Metro-North and the LIRR respectively.

A NJ Transit spokesperson challenged the accuracy of the analysis and said the real-time feed is not “100% accurate”.

“We are transparent in our reporting of all of this data. In addition to making it publicly available on our website, we report all of this data per federal requirements for official reporting purposes,” the spokesperson said.

NJ Transit also reports an “Amtrak-adjusted” on-time performance, which removes delays and cancellations attributed to Amtrak. NJ Transit reported its trains were on time 91 percent of the time this summer after accounting for Amtrak issues, 3 percentage points higher than its actual on-time rate.

Amtrak praised the cooperation it has with NJ Transit. Gerhard Williams, Amtrak’s Executive Vice President of Service Delivery & Operations, says they spent $40 million in signal and power upgrades, and that they conduct around-the-clock maintenance with NJ Transit.

“As far as I’m concerned, we are completely united and working very hard together to make sure we’re providing reliable service to their customers as well as ours,” Williams said. “We’ve been working very hard since last summer.”

Dharam Makhijani has been riding NJ Transit for 13 years. He now takes the train two or three times a week from Princeton Junction to Penn Station. He said bad commutes create a cascading effect that can put him on edge, crowd the trains that do run on time, and often make him late for work.

“It’s OK if it’s a one-time thing, but if it keeps happening it just becomes embarrassing,” Makhijani said. “There are days where in the evening you come home and you’re completely exhausted, you feel tired and have no energy to unwind with your kids.” Makhijani expressed disbelief that the percentage of significant delays wasn’t higher than Bloomberg found. “I would think it is closer to one in 10 or one in eight,” he said.

On the other railroads, such unpleasant commutes occur only a handful of times a year for the average rider. Consider riders on each of the railroads who live a roughly similar commute time from Manhattan: Summit, N.J.; Syosset on Long Island; and Croton-Harmon in New York. The two New Yorkers can be confident their trips will take the same amount of time every day. Not so for the New Jersey commuter, who is about 13 times more likely to experience a delay of a half hour or longer.

Summit Mayor Elizabeth Fagan said her family moved there in 2001 for the easy commute. Since she became mayor a year and a half ago, she has fielded a handful of calls a week from constituents about NJ Transit’s service, more during bad periods. “It matters to us as a town,” she said.

Mayors like Fagan have little influence over the transit agency. Instead, NJ Transit’s fate is tied to the annual state budget. In past years, NJ Transit plugged budget holes with money redirected from long-term capital needs in part to avoid fare hikes. A NJ Transit spokesperson says the redirected funds could only be used “to extend life of a capital asset.” Overall, about $8 billion was redirected from capital needs in the 2010s.

“Every dollar transferred then is a failed signal or broken down train now,” said Liam Blank, transportation chair for the City Club of New York. Blank said he believed that NJ Transit’s budget was “actively weaponized” in the past to solve other state problems, and “today’s riders are paying the price.”

One way riders are paying the price is by riding much older trains. A 2018 audit found approximately 35 percent of the agency’s rail cars were at least 25 years old, about the point at which they should be replaced, and that if no new cars were acquired by 2023 that would rise to 45 percent. Just 28 percent of the LIRR’s rolling stock is that old and 14 percent of Metro-North’s.

NJ Transit canceled 686 trains for mechanical issues from May to July, more than Metro-North or the LIRR canceled for all reasons combined. On a per-mile basis, NJ Transit trains failed 3.5 times more often than the LIRR’s and almost seven times more than Metro-North’s over the last twelve months.

Older trains break more often. Plus, NJ Transit has to cancel more trains because more of its trains are powered by a single locomotive, whereas nearly all of the LIRR and Metro-North trains have multiple cars with motors. If one fails, the rest can still get the train to its destination.

There is hope in the future for NJ Transit’s beleaguered riders. The agency has dedicated $3 billion for 374 new multilevel rail cars that it expects to start entering service in mid-2026, according to a NJ Transit spokesperson. The agency is targeting a fully-modernized fleet by 2031. A new transit tax on large corporations passed last year will provide some predictable funding going forward. And after decades of planning and false starts, the $16 billion Gateway Program – which aims to modernize the Northeast Corridor in northern New Jersey and Manhattan and add two new Hudson River tunnels – is finally under construction. The entire project is currently estimated to be done in 2038.

“Governor Murphy inherited a broken transit system that was underfunded and neglected by the previous administration,” spokesperson Stella Porter said in a statement. “Since 2018, the State has spent billions of dollars revitalizing NJ Transit, modernizing its entire fleet and ensuring consistent funding through the corporate transit fee – investments that will bear fruit long after the Governor leaves office.”

In the meantime, New Jersey commuters pay for the mistakes of the past. “If it’s too hot, New Jersey Transit trains don’t work. If it’s too cold, New Jersey Transit trains don’t work,” Fagan, Summit’s mayor, said. “I’m not an expert on this, but I don’t believe that hot weather should have to slow down the trains.”

(Updated to add NJ Transit’s comments on redirected capital funds in the 20th paragraph.)