Green Jersey

The mass-transit blues

Image by Adam E. Moreira.

I’m typing this from the bleak, chilly waiting area of the Newark Airport rail station. At 9:30 p.m., I misread the schedule and thought my train, to Newark Penn Station, would come at 9:32. After a few minutes passed, I realized that because it was Sunday, the next train would arrive at 10:03.

My trip doesn’t end at Penn Station. From there, I get on the PATH. What needles me is that for the same price — $7.75 plus $1.75, times two for my boyfriend and me — we could have caught a cab to my car, which is parked at my office, and driven home from there. Trying to be environmentally responsible is costing us something like an hour in extra travel time, and the chance to devour a plate of restaurant-made falafel when we get home. (If you’d tried the plane food, you’d understand.)

…Okay, never mind. We’ll have lost more than an hour. According to an announcement — at just after 10, the time the train is supposed to be getting here — Penn Station/New York trains are operating 30 to 45 minutes behind schedule.

I’m thinking we should have just taken a cab.

If New Jersey is to contribute in a major way to the environmental movement, it needs to make mass transit more appealing. That will mean increasing its convenience, and making it cheap enough that it seems like a deal, not a sacrifice. Now that gas prices are back in familiar territory, it will be harder to convince those of us with cars that we should use them less.

Granted, my boyfriend and I just spent four days in Los Angeles, where we were bound to our rental car for most of the trip. I appreciate that living in Hudson County, I hardly need a car. But I go to plenty of towns in New Jersey where a train trip would mean an extra hour or more, at a cost that doesn’t make up for the wait. Add to that the invisibility cloak I often feel I’m wearing as a pedestrian, and the train seems like an even worse idea.

When Gov. Corzine pledged to cut global warming pollution 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050, he made New Jersey one of the first states to take such a strong stand. But automobiles are the second-biggest source of those emissions nationwide, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, creating almost 1.5 billion tons of CO2 a year.

If New Jersey’s trains and buses start to seem like a better deal — operating on schedule weekdays and weekends alike, without many more fare increases like the one we saw in March — more people will use them. And that will be good for all of us.