February 7, 2023

HCCS February Edition: Yes to Clean Air, Safe Streets, NJTransit

Hello, neighbor!

We have a day of action tomorrow, February 8th at 6pm as we call in to the NJ Transit Board meeting to support public transportation investment.

Take Action

We know that highway widenings don't work and continue our work to oppose the harmful and wasteful plans to widen the Turnpike Extension. At the same time, Jersey City and Hudson County continue to have many unmet mass transportation needs. Just as the Turnpike widening is a lose-lose-lose, transit investments are a win-win-win: reduced greenhouse gas emissions and cleaner air, safer and less congested streets, and much higher capacity and more efficient travel.

Tomorrow, for the first time, we plan to dial-in to ask NJ Transit monthly board meeting to support NJ Transit and make the following basic asks for investments in clean air, safe streets, and mass transit:

• Putting the $10B turnpike expansion money to better use and support for fully funding NJ Transit beyond the 2026 fiscal cliff and to fund the long neglected capital budget.
• Developing an alternative regional transit plan to the Turnpike expansion.
• Say no to the potential for a NJ Transit Kearny gas-powered plant.
• Ask for transit and operations improvements in the near-term that can better serve residents and decrease reliance on the Turnpike for intra-Hudson travel. These including increased bus and light-rail frequency for weekends and incremental steps to achieve bus rapid transit along Kennedy Boulevard.
• Focus on improving the customer experience and staffing a customer advocate office to solve obvious issues consistently reported by riders. These range from frequently full buses, missing or late buses, blocked buses and bus stops, or unreliable and inconvenient light rail frequency that strand residents and push them towards more expensive, more dangerous, and more polluting travel means.

Dial-in and Live Streaming Info:

Sign up is not necessary but pre-registered commenters will go first. Comments are limited to 3 minutes.

• Link to sign up
• Watch livestream
• Date: February 8th
• Time: 6:00pm
• Phone: 1-800-346-7359
• Conference Code: 701939

NJ Transit has made very welcome improvements in reliability and frequency to bus service in Hudson County. Just reliability improvements – having the buses arrive on time for buses 2, 10, 22, 23, 88, and 119 – has led to over 4,000 more riders per day. The latent demand for reliable and frequent transit service in Hudson County is tremendous, and we ask that NJ Transit keep increasing investments.

Please see below for more a variety of suggested talking points, and we hope you can join the call for clean air, safe streets, and more NJ Transit:

Personal

• Talk about how you rely on NJ Transit and how you could benefit from light rail / bus frequency improvements including more service on nights and weekends.
• Talk about safe routes to transit improvements.
• Talk about how dangerous JFK Boulevard is and how shifting more trips to buses could improve your quality of life.

Climate change

• The 10.7B proposed widening of the Newark Bay-Hudson County Turnpike Extension will add fuel to the climate change fire and will work directly against Governor Murphy’s executive order to decrease climate change pollution 50% by 2030.
• Only 1.4% of cars in NJ are electric and it will take several decades to fully transition. Transportation emissions, not power generation, are the number one source of carbon emissions in NJ at double that of power generation. NJ Transit already has NJ’s most heavily used EVs, which are trains and light rail. And while we want electric buses sooner for environmental justice reasons, even non-electric systems are substantially more efficient than single occupancy vehicles.

Fully fund NJ Transit

• NJ Transit faces a fiscal cliff in 2026. Use the $10B to fully fund NJ Transit’s capital budget and stop raiding the capital budget for operating expenses. New Jersey is mortgaging a future of more sustainable and efficient transportation year-after-year including over $300 million last year that could have been spent on infrastructure improvements.

Transit Alternatives

• Despite high levels of traffic, there is currently only a single bus route, bus 120, that uses the Holland Tunnel and it does not stop in Jersey City or Hoboken. Jersey City and Hoboken deal with the road dangers, the noise, and the air pollution from the Holland Tunnel yet can’t easily use it via transit.
• Many buses that head to NYC or feed to the PATH stations are not reliable enough or frequent enough and are often stuck sitting in traffic. We need dedicated bus lanes and signal priority, which will both speed buses and increase travel capacity by 10X over a single occupancy vehicle lane.
• Thank NJ Transit for improving taking over several bus routes in Hudson County and increasing ridership by 4000 per day. There is a lot of demand and NJ Transit should continue improvements to frequency and convenience.
• NJ has fallen behind other states with nearly no dedicated bus lanes and no bus rapid transit system. We need NJ’s first true BRT. We need BRT on JFK Boulevard in Hudson County to end buses from getting stuck in traffic and there is growing local support.
• NewBus Hudson (bus network redesign) needs to be fast-tracked and we need a commitment from NJ Transit to implementing a frequent bus network for Hudson County sooner rather than later.
• Hudson-Bergen Light Rail service needs its off peak and weekend service to allow for “show-up and go” service, at least every 15 minutes on each branch line.
• JFK Boulevard is nicknamed the Boulevard of Death due to the high crash rate and number of crash injuries and deaths. Buses are 10X safer per passenger mile and more bus service will make the Boulevard safer.
• BRT can be done incrementally first with curb-side dedicated bus lanes and signal priority and other features on top piecemeal after.
• We need NJ Transit to state public support to work with Hudson County and local municipalities. Expensive traffic lights are being replaced and NJ Transit can set standards to make sure compatibility with signal priority is built-in and promise re-evaluating bus stop spacing and bus frequency if dedicated bus lanes are painted.
• Ban the practice of bus cutouts which serve other lower-capacity traffic and not bus riders. Bus cutouts are usually filled with illegal parking, slow down buses, and are dangerous and create accessibility issues. Allocate a budget for implementing quick-build bus platforms such as recently implemented in Jersey City at the Grove St PATH station.

Vision Zero

• Last year, there were over 700 crash deaths in NJ, a 15-year high. Together with gun deaths, car crashes are the leading cause of death for children in the United States.
• Investing $10B instead in more frequent train, bus, light rail service, and safe routes to transit instead of the Turnpike will save lives. Trains and buses are many times safer than single occupancy motor vehicles. According to statistics compiled by the NSC, passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous of the transportation options compared. Over the last 10 years, the passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 10 times higher than for buses, 17 times higher than for passenger trains.

NJ Transit Grid Kearny Gas Plant

• Adds to the climate crisis and prolongs dependence on fossil fuels
• NJ Transit of all agencies should not be gassing the Meadowlands and polluting some of the most transit-powered, walk-able, and bike-able communities in NJ and the country.
• Impractical – we don’t need reliable transit in case there’s another Hurricane Sandy and half the state and all of Lower Manhattan doesn’t have power – we need reliable transit for daily use, now.

Customer Advocate Office

• We need a focus on improving the customer experience to attract riders back to transit. Many obvious problems exist from full buses, buses that don’t stop for riders, missing buses, incorrect or broken signs, to chronically blocked bus routes and stops, to dirty windows and seats.
• While the customer advocate has been law and should not have been ignored by NJ Transit for the last 4 years, it is understandably a daunting job for a single individual because the problem is large. But rather than avoid and delay dealing with the scope of this problem, we ask that a full customer advocate office be established with the resources and capacity to deal with the problem head-on.
• We suggest that each County should be given a representative that will focus on improving the customer experience. We need a liaison that will talk to riders frequently and surface problems quickly for rapid remediation.
• We ask Governor Murphy to ride the bus with us. We ask high-level staff and bus supervisors ride the bus with us to see the many obvious and daily problem. We need the folks in charge to have empathy for the daily problems riders face.

Get Involved

• Tri-State Transportation Campaign are pushing for funding NJ Transit. Sign the petition here.
• Visit our local advocacy groups and reach out to them! Or are you looking to start one in your town? Let us know how we can help!
• Visit our get involved page for other ways to help.
• Read up on our on-going campaigns here.