A screeching rail system halt and airport meltdown plague the state

New Jersey’s beloved musical bard Bruce Springsteen promised Wendy in his breakthrough hit “Born to Run” that some day “we’re gonna get to that place where we really wanna go, and we’ll walk in the sun.”

But in recent days, keeping that promise to Wendy — and to everybody else trying to get in and out of the Garden State — has gotten a whole lot harder.

Springsteen’s song was released in 1975, well before congestion pricing jacked up the cost of driving into New York City; well before air traffic controllers began losing radio and radar contact with the planes they were guiding into Newark Liberty International Airport; and well before the New Jersey Transit engineers walked off the job just after midnight Friday for the first time in 40 years.

The latest in that trifecta of travel challenges left some 100,000 NJ Transit train riders wondering Friday how they’ll make their commutes to work.

“I have no idea, honestly,” said Julia Slaby, who lives in Lyndhurst and was trying to get to Manhattan for her last day of classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “Maybe I’ll take the bus.”

Another regular commuter, Laura Kounev, said her husband was going to have to drive her to Hoboken, where she can take the PATH train into Manhattan, and that he will be skipping work to pick her up in Hoboken when her workday is done.

“Oh my God, I don’t even know what I’m gonna do if it goes on for weeks,” Kounev said when asked if she hopes the strike gets resolved soon. “I hope so, because even right now we have my car being used by the babysitter to take the kids to and from school, so I take public transit.”   

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said they’re ready to resume salary talks when the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET), which represents the 450 to 500 striking NJ Transit workers, returns to the bargaining table.

“What the people of New Jersey need right now is for the members of the BLET to step up and meet their obligations to the public,” he said Friday.

Echoing the governor, NJ Transit President Kris Kolluri said they’re determined “to reach a fair and affordable deal as soon as humanly possible.”

Union chief Tom Haas said late Thursday that he wants “to bring New Jersey Transit engineers up to a wage level that is commensurate with all the other passenger railroad engineers in the Northeast,” adding that their rail engineers are paid up to 20% less than their counterparts.

“NJ Transit just remains unwilling to bridge that gap,” said Haas before the engineers went on strike.

The last NJ Transit work stoppage occurred in 1983 and lasted 34 days. And while Tony Soprano did not run into traffic jams driving home on the Pulaski Skyway from the Lincoln Tunnel in the opening credits of “The Sopranos,” the rest of us live in the real world.

New Jersey is a cramped and crowded state with a population density higher than Japan, where even on good days the traffic often moves like molasses in the tightly packed towns outside New York City and Philadelphia.

So this strike, lawmakers and union leaders say, has all the makings of a full-blown transportation crisis.

“This is a hardship for everybody,” said a locomotive engineer on a picket line who declined to give his name. “We understand that and hopefully this gets resolved as quickly as possible. Because the last thing we want to do is be out here. Believe me.”

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a gubernatorial candidate who recently made headlines when he was arrested at a federal immigration detention facility to protest President Trump’s migrant crackdown, said the “strike presents a serious burden for commuters and creates hardships for our residents in Newark, as well as people who come here to work.”

“We are hopeful that talks will resume this weekend and the strike can be brought to a quick end,” Baraka said.

NJ Transit is now urging rail riders to consider taking commuter buses into Manhattan.

But commuting by car, especially at rush hour, got far more expensive in January when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul gave the green light to relaunch congestion pricing, a first-in-the-nation plan aimed at reducing gridlock by imposing a $9 toll on most vehicles entering the core of Manhattan during peak hours.

Despite protests that made odd bedfellows of Murphy, a Democrat, and President Trump, congestion pricing remains in effect and appears to be working, at least for New Yorkers.

Meanwhile, talks have been underway between the Federal Aviation Administration and the major airlines to ease the crowding in the skies above New Jersey by limiting the number of planes flying in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport.

Those talks were launched in earnest after air traffic controllers on April 28 lost radio and radar contact for 90 seconds with the planes they were guiding into Newark, a near-disaster caused by the failure of the copper wiring that transmits radar data from New York to the controller’s base in Philadelphia.

The result was massive travel delays at Newark Liberty, one of the busiest airports in the country, that continue to this day.

The New Jersey Transit rail system is also regularly plagued by delays exacerbated by its aging and deteriorating infrastructure.

Rewind to 2010, when then Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, killed the $8.7 billion ARC Tunnel project that would have built an additional rail tunnel under the Hudson River and enabled NJ Transit to double the number of trains entering Manhattan per hour at peak travel times to 50.

Since then, NJ Transit has repeatedly been ranked the worst train system in the nation with delays resulting from aging trains breaking down and clogging the century-old North River tunnels, which were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

NJ Transit has to contend with cost overruns on repairs and a $750 million budget hole caused, in part, by the Covid pandemic. Management has tried to fill the hole by raising fares.

Christie, who pulled the plug on the project after $1.2 billion had already been spent on engineering and diverted $3 billion in toll money earmarked for the tunnel to bail out his state’s finances and avoid raising gas taxes, has steadfastly defended that decision.

“The ARC tunnel project was a fatally flawed project that projected $2-3 billion over budget, every dollar of which would have to be absorbed by New Jersey taxpayers only, with no contribution from Amtrak or the State of New York,” Christie said via email Friday. “The tunnel would go to an unnecessary new terminal underneath Macy’s, leaving commuters stranded blocks away from any other mass transit. It was a ripoff of New Jersey taxpayers for a bad project. It was the right decision then and an even better decision today.”

Last year, the Biden administration unveiled a new $11 billion Hudson River Tunnel Project that aims to complete the job that Christie thwarted.

Christie knows firsthand how much political damage can come from making it harder to get around the Garden State.

In 2013, members of his administration were accused of deliberately creating a bottleneck on the George Washington Bridge that connects New Jersey to northern Manhattan to punish a local mayor for not supporting Christie’s re-election.

Christie denied any involvement in what came to be called “Bridgegate.”

Still, there is hope that the NJ Transit strike might be short-lived. Both NJ Transit management and the striking engineers have signaled a willingness to resume contract negotiations.

Already, travel alternatives are being put in place. And with the weather getting warmer, the various ferries to Manhattan offer an especially attractive commute — if you can get to their docks.

What else can a New Jersey traveler do now besides work from home? As the Garden State’s most famous resident advised in “Thunder Road,” you can also “roll down the window, and let the wind blow back your hair.”

Assuming you’re not stuck in traffic.