How NJ Transit's Hudson County bus service went from 65% to 100% arrival rate in a month

NJ Transit buses arrived at their scheduled stops 100% — or nearly 100% — of the time in July and August on six ill-reputed bus routes in Hudson County.

Just a month earlier, in June, the average percentage of trips made on those same routes was 65%; one was as low as 25%, according to data provided to The Record and NorthJersey.com by NJ Transit.

This dramatic improvement comes after years of unreliable service stemming from allegations of widespread fraud, the effects of the coronavirus and the shortage of bus drivers — all amid intense scrutiny from the community about inconsistent bus performance.

And with better service came more passengers. All six routes saw jumps in ridership between June and September, with the Nos. 22 and 23 routes through Hoboken and North Bergen increasing the most, at 78%.

More:Should NJ Transit bus riders have access to the same route data as train riders?

The Nos. 10 and 119 routes saw 10% increases in ridership in September, exceeding pre-pandemic numbers on those lines. They traverse some of the most densely populated and fastest-growing parts of the state, along JFK Boulevard in Bayonne and Jersey City; the 119 continues to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York.

"In the case of the Hudson County routes, the deteriorating customer experience created an urgency to assume the 10 and 119 because the private carrier contracts do not have the flexibility or agility that NJ Transit Bus Operations has to accommodate a high growth route such as the 119," said Jim Smith, an NJ Transit spokesman.

NJ Transit took over the 10, 22, 23 and 119 bus routes this summer, after those lines were serviced by private contract carriers for at least a decade, most recently by Coach USA and before that Academy.

Lance Norman, deputy general manager of NJ Transit bus operations, told board members at a meeting in September that the agency added service, created an additional express bus option and began using larger buses on the 10 and 119.

“Ridership along this corridor in September 2022 has reached new highs and regularly surpasses 11,000 on weekdays," Norman said.

Hakim Hasan, a Jersey City bus rider who regularly takes the 10 and first informed The Record and NorthJersey.com about the lackluster service last year, said performance has improved, but he still has concerns.

“The service is running better than Coach, definitely, but there’s room for improvement,” he said. For example, sometimes the buses say “out of service” but are actually running. He also said buses used to stop in front of a local grocery store, but now they don't, and customers have to walk extra blocks to catch the bus with groceries in hand, an issue NJ Transit has brought to the city's attention.

Transit:Local bus companies say they face 'borderline harassment' in NYC over migrant crackdown

Dynelle Skinner has lived in Jersey City on the 119 route since 2019. She always gives herself an extra cushion in the morning in case of a late- or non-arriving bus. On Monday, she got to her stop at 7:35 a.m. and a bus didn't come for nearly an hour, even though two were scheduled during that time. Without that cushion, she would have missed a work meeting.

"I wish I could say today's experience was unusual," Skinner said. "It's always late and it's always packed."

The 10 and 119 have boomed in popularity, which was the main reason NJ Transit decided to take them over from Coach this summer.

Assemblyman Raj Mukherji, whose district is in Hudson County, has spent years talking to NJ Transit officials about the plight of bus riders in his district. Finally, the agency is listening and making positive changes, he said, but he warned that those routes will need to be a priority going forward.

"This cannot be a one-time fix. We have thousands of units presently under construction and thousands more that are ready to come online just in the Jersey City area," said Mukherji, who held a town hall on bus service with NJ Transit this summer. "They’re going to have to continue to allocate resources to meet growing demand."

The road to improvement was rocky

Mukherji reminded NJ Transit officials of what Hudson County riders have been through over the years at a budget hearing in May.

"I had constituents who were late to dropping off their kids at day care or got sick from waiting too long in the freezing cold or the snow for a bus, and one student from the Heights told us he was one absence away from having to retake a class" because of late buses, Mukherji said.

These complaints fell on deaf ears until the state Office of the Attorney General announced in November 2020 that it was joining a whistleblower lawsuit against Academy, a Hoboken-based bus company that had a $107 million contract to drive NJ Transit buses on Routes 2, 10, 22, 23, 88 and 119. The lawsuit alleged that Academy defrauded NJ Transit by $15 million.

A preliminary investigation from the Attorney General’s Office found that executives at Academy were allegedly taking drivers off NJ Transit routes and putting them on more lucrative charter routes. Then they sent the agency invoices and ridership reports with inaccurate numbers, so they continued to get paid for trips they weren’t making and avoided fees for missed trips, according to court documents.

Prosecutors said the company allegedly missed tens of thousands of bus trips over a six-year period, though reporting from The Record and NorthJersey.com indicated that problems with Academy bus service likely stretched back 15 years.

Academy settled the accusations for $20.5 million, while not admitting guilt, and ultimately lost all of its contracts with NJ Transit.

Coach USA, a Paramus-based bus company, picked up the slack on the six Hudson County bus routes that were the focus of the lawsuit. But service still suffered for the last year as the company struggled to staff the routes once the omicron variant hit the region last winter, coupled with the national shortage of bus drivers exacerbated by the pandemic.

Dan Rodriguez, vice president of public affairs at Coach, said the company went to great lengths to get the routes staffed on short notice.

"We literally brought as many drivers as necessary from as far as California to ensure that service was up and running," Rodriguez said. "That took a Herculean effort to ensure that would be met."

More:Academy Bus fined historic $20.5 million to settle NJ Transit fraud case, AG says

For the first four months after Coach took over the contract, it wasmissing only about 5% of trips on the Hudson County routes, but that took a turn for the worse once the omicron variant hit in November.

Coach missed on average 23% or more of scheduled bus trips in Hudson County from November 2021 to February 2022. From March through June, it worsened to 34% on average, according to NJ Transit data.

Path to 100%

NJ Transit started seeing more ridership on Routes 10 and 119. Because of that, the agency decided to modify the contract with Coach when it expired over the summer and take over the two routes.

“Increased ridership demand and interconnectivity of these two routes has prompted NJ Transit to evaluate and modify the operating model to meet the changing needs of the customers,” Smith told The Record and NorthJersey.com in April. The agency also decided to take over the 22 and 23. Coach now operates Route Nos. 2, 84 and 88.

Meanwhile, NJ Transit has put additional resources into especially the 10 and 119, by adding more scheduled trips to these lines and using articulated buses, the long buses that bend in the middle, which carry more passengers than other models.

Those changes and the significantly improved service overall led to jumps in ridership numbers across all six lines when comparing June 2022 to September 2022. The No. 2 through Secaucus and Jersey City increased 18% on an average weekday; the No. 10 increased 45.5%; the Nos. 22 and 23 increased 78%; the No. 88 through North Bergen and Jersey Cityincreased 52%; and the No. 119 increased 10.4%.

The pandemic forced NJ Transit to be more adaptable when it came to modifying its bus service to meet ridership demands. In the early days of the pandemic, when social distancing and masking were two of the only defenses for essential workers who relied on public transit to get to work, the agency added service to the most in-demand bus routes to accommodate distancing.

That adaptability and trying to “right-size” bus service has become more of a focal point at NJ Transit as it redesigns routes, adds service and makes other adjustments when new ridership patterns emerge.

"NJ Transit is leveraging technology to be more nimble systemwide based on the more readily available data that we see and are able to react to," Smith said.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ Transit Hudson County bus lines now arriving at all stops