As I write this, the election is still a week away, but by the time you are reading, we will know in what direction our country will be headed. Surely transit will be one of the many items to be greatly affected by that result. We’ll address possible implications and expectations of the incoming administration at our November meeting (Nov. 25th), as well as having a presentation on Lackawanna Railroad Multiple Unit Cars by member Gary Kazin. At that meeting, we’ll also be nominating officers for the next year, with elections the following month at our holiday meeting/party on December 23rd.
At our October meeting, Membership Director George Kaufer suggested rationalizing schedules on the Morris & Essex and Montclair-Boonton trains. He had prepared peak-hour schedules with a focus on ensuring that trains to Hoboken alternate more equally with those to New York, rather than having a number of trains to one destination together before a train to the other city. A task force is working to dig a bit deeper into how to make that happen, taking into account various factors including platform and tunnel availability. We realize that NJ Transit has full-time planners and schedulers, but we want to make our requests realistic and give them a good starting point.
We are keeping our eye on contradictions in fare collection—members have noted uniformed collectors on Newark light rail at the same time buses run with papered-over fareboxes—given the recent fare increase, we wonder why collection does not seem to be uniformly enforced. This is a management question, not one for frontline workers, who do the best they can with supplied equipment; dealing directly with the public as the “face” of NJ Transit is not easy, and generally they do an excellent job.
We’re looking forward to our late-fall meetings, each just before a major holiday, and our end-of year elections.
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