Riders’ Lament
For the many Bergenites who still (or again) travel to work each day, getting there has become a headache. How do we fix it?
The commute to Manhattan is why thousands, over the years, have settled in Bergen County, but Jennifer Friedman Perez is different. For her, it’s the reason she left.
Her daily bus rides from Fort Lee into Times Square and back had turned into an ordeal, especially after a slew of new high-rises along River Road poured additional traffic into the route. Then, when her company moved downtown to the World Trade Center in 2014, her daily commute ballooned to 90 minutes each way. She hoped that taking the bus to the ferry might shorten her travel time, but it didn’t.
“It was bizarre,” says Perez. “No matter what I tried to do to make the commute less, it just wasn’t working for me.” She and her husband made the difficult decision to move out of Bergen to West New York, where her commute would be 50 minutes shorter. “We loved Fort Lee, and we miss it,” she says. “But at that point the commute was just too much to bear.”
Relocating may seem like an extreme reaction to the exigencies of commuting. Or it may simply look like common sense, especially if you’re one of the 4.32 percent of Bergen County’s workforce dealing with “super commutes”—trips that take more than 90 minutes each way. Even Bergen’s average commute of 32.7 minutes—the third-longest in the state—can be daunting on those days when buses are late, trains are delayed or canceled, or a tractor-trailer turns over on the New Jersey Turnpike, all of which occur with surprising frequency. The rise in remote work has lifted the burden of commuting from the 16 percent of employed Bergenites who currently work from home, but it hasn’t done much to alleviate congestion on the roads—or in packed buses and trains. (The future of remote work is currently in question, with many businesses mandating a return to the office. Workers may not be listening, however: In the first two months of 2025, the percentage of returning workers actually dropped.)
Commuters and transportation experts alike agree that we need to fix Bergen’s commuting infrastructure. In the years from 1996 to 2009, says Zoe Baldwin, vice president of state programs for the nonprofit Regional Plan Association, “we were building New Jersey infrastructure like gangbusters.” Construction on the Hudson–Bergen Light Rail began in 1996. The Midtown Direct Line—a rail service that takes riders from some North Jersey towns directly into Penn Station—was built in 1997. Secaucus Junction was completed in 2003, the Newark Light Rail in 2006 and the Meadowlands Line in 2009. Like a train on a faulty rail, virtually all new transit-related construction screeched to a halt under the Christie administration in 2010. (In fact, from 2010 to 2019, the average commute in Bergen rose from 29.61 minutes to 33.13 minutes, at which time it began to drop slightly, thanks, at least in part, to the pandemic and, perhaps, the rise in remote work.)
What hasn’t halted are regular fare increases. In July 2024 NJ Transit implemented a 15 percent fare hike, with 3 percent automatic annual increases to continue indefinitely, in order to make up for budget shortfalls; money raised by the hikes won’t fund needed repairs and/or renovations. On the other hand, in August 2024, the state enacted a tax of 2.5 percent on large corporations, the so-called business transit fee, to provide the first dedicated source of consistent funding 56 (totaling some $800 million annually) in NJ Transit’s history. Riders and transit advocates have objected to the fare hikes given this new revenue stream, though there’s little likelihood of the increases being rescinded.
On January 1 of this year, PATH fares also increased, from $2.75 to $3.00, and tolls rose 3 percent on both the Garden State Parkway and the Turnpike. New York’s congestion pricing plan went into effect in January, increasing the cost of driving into Manhattan’s central business district by as much as $9 for those who enter during peak hours. (As of this writing, it remains uncertain whether President Trump will be able to terminate the program as promised.)
In its early days at least, congestion pricing seems to be shortening travel times through both the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, with some drivers choosing to take mass transit to avoid paying the toll. Upgrading mass transit, notes Baldwin, would almost certainly convince significantly more commuters to ditch their cars, improving the roads for those who have to, or prefer to, drive to work. While some projects that could make life easier for Bergen’s commuters are already in the works (or the planning stages), a better commute for all will depend on our willingness to draw up, implement and pay for additional long-term plans.
ON THE ROAD
Driving alone is the most popular way to commute out of, into and within Bergen County, with more than 60 percent of us choosing to travel to and from New York City inside the cocoon of our own cars (more than 80 percent of commuters within Bergen also choose to drive solo). Grace Gold, a Rutherford resident and beauty reporter who commutes into Manhattan part-time and opts to drive some of that time (depending on where she’s going and what she’s carrying), describes what she likes about traveling by car: “I’m in my own climate-controlled space, which is nice, and I can listen to an audiobook and to 1010 WINS for traffic reports.”
The problem, of course, is that many other commuters feel the same, and that’s led to congestion on the main roads into the city and through the county. In fact, the stretch of I-95 where it meets Route 4 in Fort Lee is the most congested slice of roadway in the U.S., and the rest of the Turnpike in northern New Jersey isn’t much better. With an eye to alleviating congestion, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority has approved a plan, known as the New Jersey Turnpike Expansion Project, to reconstruct and widen the Newark Bay Bridge and expand the Turnpike extension through Jersey City and at the approach to the Holland Tunnel, at a projected cost of $11 billion. A recent poll conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University showed bipartisan support for the project, with 63 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans in favor of it. “New Jer seyans have very long commutes; they do not like them; and they’re looking for any way out of them,” says Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University and executive director of the university’s poll.
Not everyone supports the project. Krishna Murthy, president and CEO of EZ Ride, a public-private partnership charged with reducing congestion and promoting economic growth in Bergen County, believes the obvious solution to congestion on the roads is “having better transit and more transit—it’s a no-brainer.” And critics have noted that, while the expansion may hasten traffic to the Holland Tunnel, it will do nothing to widen the tunnel itself. “All of that money could go toward extending transit and investing in transportation instead of widening our highways,” says Talia Crawford, advocacy and organizing manager for the nonprofit Tri-State Transportation Campaign.
CRITICAL MASS
The performance of NJ Transit’s trains and buses is measured by the mean distance between failures (such as breakdowns), and using that metric, January 2025 represented a low point for the agency’s aging fleet. The mean distance between rail failures that month was 50,000 miles, the lowest in nine years; for bus failures it was 9,000, down from a high of 16,000 in 2017. Most of those failures were suffered by the oldest vehicles in the fleet, some 1,000 buses and 250 rail cars that desperately need replacing. And there’s a chance that could happen, if Governor Murphy’s 2026 budget, which allots $767 million for their replacement, is passed. Don’t expect a quick fix, however: As of this writing, 113 new rail cars ordered in 2018 have yet to be delivered (but are expected in mid-2025).
A joint plan announced by NJ Transit and Amtrak (which owns the tracks along which NJ Transit trains run) to expedite infrastructure repairs could lead to a reduction in the track- and wire-related delays that were blamed for last year’s so-called “summer of hell”; unfortunately, those repairs, funded by $112 million in federal grants, will cover only the stretch of track between New Brunswick and Newark and so won’t benefit Bergen riders. A better chance to improve rail infrastructure lies with the ongoing Gateway Program, which seeks to expand and renovate the Northeast Corridor rail line between Newark and New York City. The program, which is designed to double train capacity along the corridor, includes plans to build new rail bridges in the Meadowlands, construct a new set of tunnels under the Hudson River and Bergen Hill, and perhaps create the Bergen Loop, a proposed track that would make it possible for Bergen commuters on the Pascack Valley, Main and Bergen lines to travel directly into Penn Station. A caveat: The Gateway Program isn’t slated for completion until 2035, and there’s no guarantee that the Bergen Loop will be included.
A project that’s almost certain to benefit Bergen bus commuters is the planned replacement of the Port Authority’s Midtown bus terminal—the busiest in the world—projected for completion in 2032. The Port Authority says this work will add capacity and meet projected mid-century commuter growth. It should address a main gripe of bus commuters: the long rush-hour wait to get into the terminal.
Another commuter irritant: The lack of up-to-the-minute accuracy in the NJ Transit real-time mobile app. “The app is good,” says Gold, “but it could be better—it’s not always the most accurate.” As of this writing, there was no news on whether the app would be improved any time soon.
SEEING THE LIGHT?
A major boon for Bergen commuters would be the extension of the Hudson–Bergen Light Rail into Bergen County. “It would be huge to the region,” says Crawford, who notes that some 22 million riders used the light rail in 2024. Currently, the line’s impact on Bergen commuters is in name only, since its terminus is in North Bergen. A proposed extension would bring the terminus to Englewood Hospital, linking commuters in eastern Bergen County to PATH stops in Jersey City and stops in Manhattan from the World Trade Center to 33rd Street. For three decades, 58 Bergen politicians, including Representative Josh Gottheimer, Bergen County Executive Jim Tedesco and former State Senator Loretta Weinberg, have been fighting for the extension, whose future, as of this writing, is uncertain.
Other possible means to reduce congestion on our roads include ferries, carpooling and vanpooling, but their impact is limited. Currently, the only ferry serving Bergen County commuters is the NY Waterway line going from Edgewater to West 33rd Street in Manhattan. If you live near Edgewater and work in Midtown, it’s a workable alternative, but it’s pricey, with a one-way trip costing $12.25 and a monthly pass going for $402.50, and it’s limited in capacity and subject to delays and weather disruptions. There are no present plans to increase or extend ferry service from Bergen.
Carpooling and vanpooling reduce congestion and the cost of commuting, and in fact, of Bergenites who drive to and from work, some 7 percent carpool. Vanpooling is less popular, likely because, as Murthy notes, “it depends on a large number of people having the same work schedule, going to work at the same time, coming back at the same time, ideally working at the same place.” When all of that comes together, though, it can be an excellent option for commuters. Margaret Edsall was taking the now defunct Red and Tan bus to the 178th Street bus terminal, then switching to the subway for her commute from Tenafly to Columbia University, but the bus frequency was cut during the pandemic and never fully bounced back. Edsall and her husband drove in together until she learned of a vanpool, started by Columbia Associate Professor Huiming Yin, that could take her from Tenafly directly to the Columbia campus. “It not only saved me time,” she says, “it also kept me from getting frazzled.” Commuters interested in finding, or forming, a van or carpool can get more information from EZ Ride (ezride.org) or NJ Rideshare (njrideshare.com).
Small efforts like car and van pooling can make a difference in individual commutes and, to a lesser extent, to traffic congestion overall. But it’s long-term, big-vision plans like the Gateway Program that hold the promise of a truly improved commute for Bergen residents and others in North Jersey. Baldwin notes that, at a time when the federal government appears to be cutting back spending in most sectors, additional plans to improve the commuter experience may not be immediately forthcoming. But, she suggests, the state needs to start planning now. “Being prepared not only gives your residents and riders a vision of what could be, but it also puts the state in a really good position to be competitive when federal opportunities open up,” she says. “And we’re New Jersey—we’re nothing if not competitive.”
