Gov. Philip D. Murphy said the transit agency was eager to reach a deal with engineers whose walkout has caused disruptions for tens of thousands in the New York area. The union said NJ Transit walked away from talks.
Gov. Philip D. Murphy said the transit agency was eager to reach a deal with engineers whose walkout has caused disruptions for tens of thousands in the New York area. The union said NJ Transit walked away from talks.
Live Updates: Governor Apologizes as NJ Transit Strike Leaves Commuters Searching for Rides
Gov. Philip D. Murphy said the transit agency was eager to reach a deal with engineers whose walkout has caused disruptions for tens of thousands in the New York area. The union said NJ Transit walked away from talks.
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Newark, N.J.
The platforms at Newark Penn Station were nearly empty on Friday morning. Dakota Santiago for The New York Times
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Manhattan
Commuters from New Jersey arriving at the Wall Street/Pier 11 landing on Friday morning. Karsten Moran for The New York Times
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Manhattan
Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
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Hoboken, N.J.
Commuters on a PATH platform. Karsten Moran for The New York Times
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Manhattan
Commuters at Penn Station during the morning rush hour. Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
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East Orange, N.J.
Platforms were almost empty at the NJ Transit Brick Church station. Bryan Anselm for The New York Times
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Manhattan
A union supporter outside Penn Station. Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
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Elizabeth, N.J.
Commuters scrambled to find alternative transportation, including NJ Transit buses. Dave Sanders for The New York Times
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Jersey City, N.J.
Traffic was smooth from New Jersey into Manhattan on Friday morning. Karsten Moran for The New York Times
The first statewide transit strike in New Jersey in more than 40 years began just after midnight Friday when about 450 unionized locomotive engineers walked off their jobs in a pay dispute, shutting down New Jersey Transit’s rail network.
Some commuters showed up at NJ Transit rail stations on Friday morning unaware of the shutdown, while others rushed to find different modes of transportation into New York City and beyond for work. Tens of thousands of commuters ride the trains on a typical workday.
They rushed to take ferries, NJ Transit buses and charter bus services. Amtrak was an option for passengers in some areas of New Jersey, but at a steep cost. Some commuters in Trenton said they could not afford a one-way ticket of up to $118 into the New York City metropolitan region, about six times the cost of a NJ Transit rail ticket. (Later in the morning, some Amtrak fares posted online were lower.)
Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey apologized on Friday morning to commuters whose trips had been disrupted and said that NJ Transit was eager to reach deal with the union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
“It is a slap in the face of every commuter and worker who relies on NJ Transit,” Mr. Murphy said at a news conference.
Union members began picketing early Friday.
Tom Haas, the union’s general chairman, said on Friday that the group had been optimistic about a possible settlement until late Thursday night. “They decided to walk away,” he said. “It’s definitely frustrating, but we’re willing to go back to the table.”
Here’s what we’re covering:
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Working from home: NJ Transit urged rail commuters whose presence at their workplaces was not essential to work from home during the strike. Some big employers in New York, including Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, gave workers temporary permission to work remotely or said they would consider providing flexibility.
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Bus service: NJ Transit’s statewide bus system continued to operate as scheduled. The agency hired private buses to substitute for its train service, but they will start running on Monday, and Kris Kolluri, the chief executive of NJ Transit, said that the chartered buses could accommodate only about 20 percent of the displaced train riders. There is no supplemental bus service on Friday.
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Using your tickets: Commuters who already have NJ Transit rail tickets and passes to or from New York, Newark or Hoboken may use those tickets on NJ Transit’s existing bus routes and light rail lines. But they will not be cross-honored on other carriers, including Amtrak, PATH, ferries and private carrier buses.
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Pay dispute: The union says its members want parity in wages with their counterparts who work for the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad. Mr. Kolluri said an offer the union voted down in March would have raised the average annual pay of full-time engineers to $172,000 from $135,000. But Mr. Haas said those figures were inflated.
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Picket lines: The union planned to have picket lines at Penn Station in New York, at NJ Transit’s headquarters in Newark and at the train station in Atlantic City.
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Sports and concerts: NJ Transit also carries fans to concerts and sporting events at the Prudential Center in Newark and MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. Before the midnight deadline, the agency had already canceled service to MetLife for Shakira’s concerts on Thursday and Friday nights. Here are alternate ways to get to and from MetLife.
The abrupt suspension of all of New Jersey Transit’s train service on Friday will make it harder for Gov. Philip D. Murphy to claim that he rescued the troubled transit agency.
After inheriting a statewide system that had suffered from years of underinvestment, Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, said he would fix New Jersey Transit if it killed him.
But heading into the last year of his second term, he still had problems to solve at the agency, including too-frequent equipment failures.
That was before he had to explain late Thursday why the state’s first transit strike in more than four decades was about to happen on his watch.
Mr. Murphy said the fault lay not with his administration but with a holdout union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, that refused to accept a fair deal.
He also said that any suggestion that the rail network was in worse shape than when he first took office was false.
“It’s not more broken,” he said, arguing that the system had improved by several measures, including safety and customer satisfaction.
“That doesn’t mean there haven’t been bumps in the road,” he said. “This is clearly a bump.”
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Michael Johnson, 38, a nurse who lives in East Orange, couldn’t believe it when he climbed to the train platform and heard that there was a strike. “This is ridiculous,” he said. It made no sense to him why the two sides would let the trains halt instead of reaching an agreement. “This is crazy,” he said. “I want to know why.” Mr. Johnson was on his way to the city to meet a friend, and was forced to reschedule. “It definitely messed up my plans,” he said.
Mark Bonamo
Reporting from Newark Penn Station
“I’ve been up all night, checking the news. When the strike was called, I was really worried. We can get through the weekend, but anything more than that makes me very nervous. Look around, the station is completely dead. Without the commuters, we have absolutely no business.”
Daisy McKeon, 36, the owner of the Trackside Cafe inside the Hoboken train station. On Friday, she sent staff home early and she gave away some fresh baked goods and sandwiches.
Mark Bonamo
Reporting from Newark Penn Station
Tom Haas, the NJ Transit general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union, was optimistic a settlement would happen until about 10 p.m. last night.
“They decided to walk away. The other side has to give my members a fair and reasonable wage that is comparable with what other train engineers make in the area,” Haas said, specifically citing the Long Island Railroad, Metro-North, PATH and Amtrak. “It’s definitely frustrating, but we’re willing to go back to the table. The last thing we wanted is to be where we are.”
Dakota Santiago
Scenes from NJ Transit Gateway Center Plaza 2 in Newark, N.J.
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“My bosses are cool with it. They knew this was happening.”
Jay Frederick, 47, lives in Trenton and works in Newark. He takes NJ Transit to work Monday through Friday but won’t get there today. Instead he’ll go home and wash his hair. Mr. Frederick knew the strike was happening, but not that shuttle service to Newark from Hamilton won’t start until Monday. He came to Trenton thinking he might take an Amtrak train, then thought better of it given the fare.
At the Amtrak counter, customers are trying to find workarounds for getting to NYPenn without paying the $98 ticket fee. A few have asked how much it costs to get to Newark instead. One asked for a discount and was denied. “It is what it is,” a ticket agent said.
Mark Bonamo
Reporting from Newark Penn Station
The blank schedule board, an empty waiting room and a sign showing no direction home tells the story of the impact of the NJ Transit strike at the Hoboken train station.
Rahul Thota, 20, is an international student studying computer science at Rowan University. He didn’t know about the strike when he took a bus here this morning hoping to get to a doctor’s appointment in Edison. Now he has to figure out how to get back to campus, a 100-mile trip that could take him three hours, he said. He canceled his appointment with the Indian doctor in Edison that his family found for him. “I can’t afford to pay more than $100 to get the Amtrak ticket,” he said. “I’m a student. I have bills to pay.”
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Gov. Murphy said that out of all the days of the week for a rail strike to start, Friday was most beneficial for NJ Transit. With hybrid work, Friday is the slowest day for commuters who work in offices in New York City. He said the agency would study what worked and didn’t work today and adjust before busier commutes on Monday and later next week.
Kris Kolluri, the president of NJ Transit, said at a news conference this morning that contract negotiations between the agency and union of locomotive engineers ended on Thursday night on a “very conciliatory note” before the strike. While he expressed optimism about future negotiations, he said the union would have to take the next step in the discussions. The union disagrees.
Gov. Philip D. Murphy apologized to commuters whose trips were disrupted on Friday morning because of the strike and called it a “slap in the face of every commuter.” He urged the union of locomotive engineers to reach a fair resolution with NJ Transit.
“I didn’t know! I thought it was next week,” said Chennelle Miller, 29, a social worker trying to get from Brick Church Station in East Orange to her job in Long Island City. Her body slumped when she recalled that she had received a note from Uber saying its prices were about to surge. Nevertheless, she soon decided she had only one workable option. “I’m gonna take a Lyft,” she said.
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Taxis wait outside empty platforms at the Brick Church Station in East Orange, N.J. on Friday.
A prolonged strike would have repercussions beyond complicating commutes: New Jersey Transit also shuttles fans to concerts and sporting events at the Prudential Center in Newark and MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.
Among the first casualties of the looming strike were the trains and buses the agency had planned to provide for access to Shakira’s concerts at MetLife on Thursday and Friday nights. It announced days before the strike deadline that it would cancel service to the concert on both nights.
Beyoncé is scheduled to perform five times at MetLife over the next two weeks, raising fears among some concertgoers that they would encounter gridlock and frustrating delays, or perhaps be unable to get to the stadium at all.
But the BeyHive may not have cause for concern: Many fans trying to get in and out of MetLife for Shakira’s sold-out show on Thursday night were met with an efficient bus experience. Coach USA is providing service between the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan and the stadium for Shakira’s concerts, with service beginning at 4 p.m. Return trips begin at 10:45 p.m.
Round-trip tickets cost $25, and reservations are required. A similar schedule is planned for Beyoncé’s shows.
On Thursday, concertgoers arriving at Port Authority were directed to its 42nd Street entrance, where they were quickly moved through a queue and received a wristband for their return trips. The total travel time for one New York Times reporter, from the bus terminal to the security gate at MetLife, was 50 minutes, and she arrived at the concert around 7 p.m.
Other options to get to the stadium include driving or ride-share services. Traffic was heavy Thursday night, and some fans in cars were dropped off at the highway exit outside the arena and had to walk the rest of the way.
As Shakira began to move into her final set of songs, with hits like “Whenever, Wherever” and “Waka Waka,” the first group of bus travelers made its way out of the stadium. Some fans began to sprint toward the bus, worried they would miss their reserved 10:45 p.m. trip. But more than a dozen buses were waiting to bring them back to New York.
“I’m supposed to start to work at 10 o’clock! Now I’m supposed to take the bus to the PATH? It’s too much.”
Mary Puma, 46, a housekeeper who lives in East Orange and works in SoHo arrived at the Brick Church Station at 9:15 am and was thrown into a panic. She held her head in her hands as she tried recalling the instructions she was given.
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Mark Bonamo
Reporting from Newark Penn Station
James P. Louis, national vice president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, was standing in the picket line outside of NJ Transit headquarters in downtown Newark on Friday morning.
“I was with Mr. Kolluri last night through 15 hours of negotiations,” Louis said. “We made them an offer that we thought would finally settle more than five years of contract talks. They said they can’t accept the offer. Now it’s in their court.”
He expressed sympathy with frustrated passengers.
“The passengers that we see everyday are like a second family to us. We feel what they’re going through,” Louis said. “Nobody wins over this. We want to get this settled. The passengers need to know that there’s going to be a train for them in the morning.”
When unionized workers take the drastic action of walking off their jobs — like the engineers at New Jersey Transit did on Friday — they usually gain the upper hand in a dispute with their employer, at least temporarily.
The strike by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen seems to fit that pattern, said Bill Dwyer, an associate teaching professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.
“If there’s a power imbalance, I think it goes in favor of the union at this point,” Mr. Dwyer said in an interview on Friday morning.
Walking out “gives the union additional leverage because the ridership is not going to be happy,” Mr. Dwyer said. The transit agency’s customers are “going to be very impatient” to have the service restored, he said.
But he said that any advantage would be short-lived if New Jersey Transit retaliates by cutting off funding for the engineers’ health insurance. Striking workers start to feel the financial pinch of not getting paid after a couple of weeks on the picket line, he said. Having to cover their own health-care costs could compound that discomfort quickly, he said.
“They are escalating the situation,” Mr. Dwyer said, referring to the union’s walkout, “and the bigger guns might start coming out.”
He said the first week of a walkout can feel like “a big party” for the strikers. Their initial attitude is, “We’ll show them. They’ll come crawling back,” he said.
But that enthusiasm can fade after a couple of weeks, leading some hard-pressed strikers to consider crossing picket lines, he said.
For the roughly 1,300 Metro-North weekday passengers who commute from New York’s Orange and Rockland counties, where riders need to pass through New Jersey to get to Manhattan, the commute has gotten a lot more complicated.
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it would allow its Metro-North customers who are stranded by the strike in those counties to ride on its Hudson or Harlem rail lines for no extra cost.
But to get there, commuters must drive, catch a ferry or take a bus to rail stations on the other side of the Hudson River. The M.T.A. has posted travel alternatives for each of the 12 New York stations affected by the strike.
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The train platform at Brick Church Station in East Orange was eerily empty and quiet near the end of what would have been the Friday morning rush hour. The only people in the platform were a trio of women in orange t-shirts and chartreuse NJ Transit Customer Assistance vests. It seemed their message that the trains are not running had spread.
Gov. Phil Murphy and Kris Kolluri, the NJ Transit chief executive, are scheduled to hold a news conference at 10 a.m. at the Aberdeen Matawan Station.
“I’m on my feet all day, and my foot hurts. I wasn’t going to miss this appointment.”
Julie Meyers, 61, a nurse from Newtown, Penn., who paid $98 for an Amtrak ticket to Penn Station in New York to see her podiatrist. On NJ Transit, the ticket would have cost $32, she said.
With the New Jersey Transit rail system shut down on Friday, commuters in some parts of the state had another train option: Amtrak. But the cost for a ticket to the ride passenger rail line was significantly more than NJ Transit, frustrating commuters who said they could not afford the higher rates.
A one-way ticket on NJ Transit from Trenton to Penn Station in New York City is $19.25. At one point on Friday morning, the fare on Amtrak was as much as $118. Later in the morning, however, the Amtrak website displayed much lower rates, from $39 to $54, for a ticket from Trenton to New York City.
Amtrak officials did not immediately respond to questions on Friday morning about whether the rates were reduced because of the NJ Transit strike. But the lower prices were posted too late for some riders who paid higher fares earlier in the morning.
“Amtrak is too expensive,” said Glenn McDonell, 61, a shipyard worker who had planned to take a $14 NJ Transit train from Trenton to Newark to visit his son, compared with $94 on Amtrak. “My son’s going to have to come pick me up.”
Amtrak was an option for just some NJ Transit rail commuters who live close enough to stations the passenger rail line services. In addition to Trenton, Amtrak stops in Princeton Junction, New Brunswick, Metropark and Newark before arriving at Penn Station in New York City.
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“I don’t want to leave them hanging. I want to be a good worker.”
Lawrence Dydzuhn, 60, a handyman who lives in Elizabeth and works in Midtown Manhattan. He left for work an hour early because of the strike. Waiting for the 112 bus instead of his usual train he explained that his work partner is off on Fridays and people still needed work done.
Here in Trenton, a pair of reps in neon yellow “NJ Transit Customer Assistance” vests are helping flummoxed passengers in Spanish and English.
In downtown Elizabeth, dozens of confused-looking commuters are walking — studying street signs, asking passers-by for directions — the two blocks from the train station to the bus stop.
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The shutdown of the New Jersey Transit rail system on Friday could inflict economic damage across the region, hurting shops and restaurants that depend on commuter spending and companies whose workers could be delayed getting to the office.
New Jersey Transit trains are a major piece of the region’s commuter transit network, ferrying about 70,000 people to their jobs in New York City every workday. The agency said it would run extra buses for commuters starting Monday, but they can accommodate only about 20 percent of the daily train riders.
With delays likely, every hour that all New Jersey commuters are late arriving to work in the city could cost employers about $6 million in lost productivity, according to an analysis by the Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group.
About half of those commuters work in high-paying industries like finance and information, the group said.
Since the last New Jersey Transit strike in 1983, many more people, including a majority of New Jersey Transit rail passengers, have gained the ability to work remotely. Many companies embraced hybrid work during the pandemic, allowing employees to split their workweek between the office and home. Fridays are the least popular day for in-person work.
The transit agency encouraged riders in the weeks before the strike to prepare to work from home. Nearly 60 percent of rail passengers have hybrid schedules, according to a survey by New Jersey Transit of its passengers a year ago.
Companies that have called their workers back to the office five days a week, including Goldman Sachs, said they had been preparing for a potential transit strike and discussing expectations for their employees, including allowing some to work from home.
Citigroup, one of the largest employers in the city, said it had allowed employees whose jobs can be performed remotely to work outside the office because of the strike. (Most Citigroup employees have hybrid arrangements.)
The economic fallout will extend beyond corporate workers and their companies, with local businesses also feeling pain.
Many New Jersey Transit rail stations are in the heart of suburban towns and surrounded by restaurants that serve commuters, and some major rail stations, such as Newark Penn Station, have coffee shops inside them. There are also numerous restaurants in Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, the terminus for New Jersey Transit trains.
Morning commuters have provided a steady stream of business for Cait and Abby’s Bakery in South Orange, N.J., since it opened 27 years ago, said Raul Saade, its owner. The bakery, next to the South Orange station, opens at 6:30 a.m. to serve passengers traveling to New York, he said.
While there are fewer commuters now than before the pandemic, Cait and Abby’s serves about 100 people a day on average who buy coffee and often a pastry before they board the train, accounting for an important portion of the bakery’s business, Mr. Saade said.
“If it goes on for the whole week,” Mr. Saade said of the strike, “we are going to suffer.”
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The New Jersey Transit locomotive engineers who went on strike Friday have complained that their counterparts at other railroads that serve New York City earn significantly more — at least $10 more per hour — and they want parity.
“We’re just looking for a wage that is closer to what the average of what every other passenger engineer in the United States makes,” said Tom Haas, general chairman of Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. The union says its members want parity with their counterparts who work for the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad.
Kris Kolluri, the chief executive of New Jersey Transit, contended that a tentative agreement that the union’s members rejected in a landslide would have raised their starting hourly wage to $49.82, from $39.78.
The gap between the union’s pay demands and what the agency is offering is very wide.
Mr. Kolluri said the offer the union voted down in March would have raised the average annual pay of full-time engineers to $172,000 from $135,000, and could force the agency to raise fares by 17 percent or more.
But Mr. Haas said those figures were inflated. The union, he said, would happily accept a contract that raised engineers’ annual pay to $172,000.
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