Quote:
Originally Posted by Alon
NJT is incapable of serving diagonal commutes right now - the frequencies suck, the punctuality sucks, the idea of timed transfers is foreign to it, etc. Forget about it. It can't even do a transfer at Secaucus toward Manhattan right. Even with vastly better industry practices, MOM isn't going to serve any of those diagonal commutes, because at current driving and parking prices in Princeton, only eco-martyrs like me are going to try using the transit system. And eco-martyrs like me don't live in Ocean County. Maybe if Princeton Junction and New Brunswick looked like this then it would work.
The trains-per-day limit just shows you how screwed up American railroad practices are - they're lifted entirely from freight. Everywhere else in the world, including US transit systems that are not mainline rail, people think in tph. If for some reason you can only run 20 tph at rush hour, you could easily do 240 trains per day in each direction. Capacity limits are measured in terms of headways and schedule maintenance, and those work entirely in tph terms. Tpd matter only if your trains need to be stabled somewhere midday (i.e. your off-peak frequencies suck so much they won't just turn around and keep earning revenue) or if you can't punctually maintain your peak feasible capacity.
Nowhere on NJT, or Metro-North, or the LIRR, is 30 tph done on a double-track line (one-way running doesn't count). Metro-North runs 50 tph into Grand Central, but insists on running trains 3-and-1 on the trunk instead of 2-and-2. I'm told that Amtrak is forced to single-track at rush hour because the LIRR thinks that its ~38 tph into Penn Station can't fit into a 2-and-2 situation. Peak traffic through the Hudson is 24 tph, and New Jersey thinks it can't add any trains. |
The Frequencies are slowly improving , a decade ago they were horrible but there is still room for improvement without a doubt. The County Estimates are never wrong and that part of the state is growing by 250,000 a decade , too ignore it and push it onto already overcrowded stations is a mistake and a bad one. MOM also hits some of the most popular shore line communities....like Toms River and the Bays and inlets near Forked River. The Sprawl is starting to become dense , so another reason to extend Rail....which would encourage smart growth. By the End of the Decade New Brunswick will be a dense steaming metropolis high rises and skyscrapers are under construction or planned for Downtown. A Light Rail line will join the MOM to the Raritan Valley line and West Trenton line , sealing the Central Jersey Transit network.
They've improved there frequencies but have a long way to go...Northeastern systems are way ahead of the rest of the Country and Canada....in the commuter rail dept.
Actually there are areas that get 30tph , not all trains are counted , some are deadheads and others are Express which don't always appear on the timetables....but listening to a scanner will show you there are more trains moved...
As for Transfers there lined up on the LIRR , MNRR , and NJT with 5-10 minutes between with certain lines , but mostly cross platform or level change. Same with Light Rail , PATH and Subway everything is timed to line up and meet....no real issues there at least at Secaucus JCT , Jamaica , Woodside , Newark Penn , Stamford , Trenton , Rahway and a few other stations...
Whens the last time you actually used our network? It sounds like you've never ridden anything except the NEC....and whens the last time you've driven around NJ?