NJ Transit riders had a chance to share their frustrations and offer solutions to the board of the beleaguered transit agency Wednesday. NorthJersey.com transportation reporter Colleen Wilson covered the meeting and shared some of their suggestions, including ways to improve communication around delayed trains.

“The boards that tell them what tracks trains are coming on, the trains frequently disappear or their track numbers disappear and it just causes a whole lot of confusion and chaos. And that seems like one of those things that’s in New Jersey Transit’s wheelhouse that could be fixed,” Wilson said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News.

“There is not a whole lot of detail about immediate plans to replace and upgrade the aging electric traction infrastructure, your wires, your signals, your substations that all the things that provide power to the trains. And so, what Amtrak and New Jersey Transit are basically saying is that all the resources they’re throwing into that right now is what’s kept those problems mostly at bay for at least a number of weeks. But how long can they continue? How long can they sustain that? That’s the question.”

And while the state, NJ Transit, and Amtrak work together to address delays, the Biden Administration has stepped in to help broker a deal between NJ Transit and the union representing engineers, who have voted to strike after negotiations failed.

“With just hours to go before that deadline elapsed, President Biden decided to execute a presidential emergency board, which is a group of people who will now have to kind of hear both sides from New Jersey Transit and the brotherhood of locomotive engineers and train men,” Wilson said. ” And then they will come up with a report and basically try to negotiate a contract, or at least try to weed through what both sides are saying and make some decisions, or make them come to some decisions.”