Trains Make Modest Rebound. Today, New Jersey Transit launches the first of what will eventually be 234 cars that offer seating on two levels. The Governor and both U.S. Senators are riding the inaugural train at noon from Trenton to New York to celebrate.
+
The configuration on single-level trains is two seats to one side of the corridor and three to the other. The configuration on the two-level trains is two seats on either side of a wider aisle. In a typical 10-car train, there will be only 225 more seats because of this tradeoff. That seems a poor margin of increase for an entire second level of seating, and one must wonder what transit managers and designers were thinking.
+
Yes, some people avoid sitting in the middle of the three-seat side, but groups of friends and family found the wider bank congenial. The seatbacks also flipped to create little groupings in facing seats. That could be wasteful when space hogs used that feature to create more private space than they were entitled to, and if the conductors didn't restore the seats to their original orientation after a group disembarked the train. The new cars' seats are anchored in place.
+
But eliminating the third seat does not seem really wise if the prime objective is to provide more seats on a given train. Besides,

Seats are arranged two-by-two on the upper and lower levels, allowing more room in the aisles but no more middle seats that often serve as rest areas for briefcases and jackets.

For Joe Scholtz, who will ride the new cars on his daily commute from Manhattan to Newark, that means he'll be sitting closer to his fellow commuters. And he's not necessarily thrilled about that.

"Sitting next to someone is not the end of the world," he said on a recent morning en route to Newark. "But it's too crowded when there's two in a set."

These cars are also extraordinarily expensive:

"The cars each cost about $1.9 million, for a total of $458 million for the fleet. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is paying $250 million, with the rest coming from the federal government."

Since New Jersey is one of those states that sends more money to Washington than it generally gets back, this is good news for NJ taxpayers. But regular train riders might prefer lower fares.
+
Not just NJ Transit's but Amtrak's ridership is also increasing, for reasons having to do with hassles in flying and increased airfares and gasoline prices. Alas, Amtrak is an inexcusably badly run operation. Here, Amtrak owns Newark Penn Station and the tracks on the main line. The result is that on-time NJ Transit trains sometimes have to wait for late Amtrak trains, delaying far more New Jersey commuters than the passengers the Amtrak train carries. And the station's lavatories are closed for a couple of hours in the middle of the nite when New Jerseyans arriving via the PATH (interstate subway system, NJ and NY) need them. What does Amtrak care about New Jersey? Or anyplace else, for that matter?
+
In an article sent to me by my friend Gaetano in the Ironbound (the part of Newark that gets its name from being surrounded by railroad tracks), Boston.com reports:

In an effort to improve Amtrak service between major cities along the East Coast, a group of business leaders Tuesday [Nov. 28th] proposed transferring ownership of the Northeast Corridor rail line to the federal government.

A study released Tuesday by the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University also calls for the creation of a partnership between the state and federal government, which would have policy control over the line.

I don't know about that. I'd rather that the affected states — only — form a consortium to buy the tracks and perhaps that portion of Amtrak that operates here, and that the individual states buy the stations. New Jersey Transit is hugely better run than Amtrak, and a consortium of state transit authorities answerable narrowly to the people of this region would seem more likely to give us good service than a Federal operation. We don't need Texans telling us how to run trains in the Northeast.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,932 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:17 PM