Commuters in Cranford lined up Friday morning for express buses to the Port Authority Bus Station in Manhattan, one of the few remaining routes available into New York City for some 100,000 weekday rail riders left stranded after New Jersey Transit engineers walked off the job at midnight.
How’s it going?
“Not well,” replied Patrick Johansen, one of those on line. “This is my first morning, and I wasn’t sure where to go and how to get there. . . This is not the closest bus station to my house, but it seemed like the easiest one to figure out.”
Added Matt DiRusso: “Tonight I was supposed to go to the Yankee game, straight after work. So I don’t know how I’m going to do that now because getting home could be an issue.”
DiRusso said he’ll have the option to work from home, and generally, fewer people were heading into the office on a Friday, anyway. But others don’t have that choice.
“I’ve got three kids. I work full time in the city,” said Lauren Hayes.
Hayes caught a ride with BoxCar, one of the private charter bus companies that ramped up service in anticipation of the strike. She said, it’s worth a few extra dollars. “I went ahead and booked in advance for the next couple weeks to be prepared … because the lines sometimes here for these regular NJ Transit buses can be sometimes 40-50 people deep,” she said.
Express buses did look full, and they ran frequently enough to keep lines from getting too long on Friday morning.
“It did not have to come to this,” said Gov. Phil Murphy as the strike began. “It is a mess frankly of [the engineers’] own making, and a slap in the face of every commuter that relies on NJ Transit.”
Murphy spoke Friday morning at an empty train station in Aberdeen, noting the morning commute encountered few issues. He said the strike followed a good-faith offer to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
“It would’ve given their members almost exactly what they’ve asked for: being paid the same wage as engineers at other transit systems in our region,” Murphy said. “And crucially that contract would’ve provided our engineers their hard-earned raises — without blowing up NJ Transit’s budget.”
But talks went off the rails over a so-called me-too provision that lets other NJ Transit unions demand similar contract enhancements.
“We’ve had three days of extraordinarily productive decisions,” said NJ Transit CEO Kris Kolluri of the latest talks. “If you sort of look at this contract as a 100 percent deal, we’re 95 percent there.”
If Monday comes without a contract agreement, NJ Transit plans extra bus services — including four park-and-ride lines — that will cost the agency an extra $4 million a day, officials said.
The last NJ Transit strike in 1983 lasted 34 days.
