UPDATE: At the Sept. 21 Metuchen Borough Council meeting, Mayor Thomas Vahalla offered the following thought: “Bill [Boerth] and I met with the Metuchen Taxi and Limousine Company. They are interested in working with us to formulate a way for them to charge for the route or running their own route. It was a very positive meeting. We met with one of their operations managers and one of their owners. They said they have two 16-passenger vans that they can use, and we gave them the ridership numbers. We will work with them to develop fliers or some type of notification so that people can give their names and sign up, and they will work out what the costs will be. We may be able to substitute our bus with their private company transporting people, which I think is a great thing.”
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As of the Sept. 8 Metuchen Borough Council meeting, Mayor Thomas Vahalla said that Middlesex County would be unable to run the bus as part of a regionalized bus service route.
“Our discussion of last time was that we would run the bus until the end of the year,” Vahalla said. “I have reached out to Keep Middlesex Moving and they have no capacity for running the bus. The president, Bill Neary, referred me to… the county. The county said ‘We would love to have the bus, but you continue to pay for the driver and maintenance and all the charges,’ which gets us back to square one. So if we run it, we should run it ourselves.”
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With one councilman referring to the free Metuchen jitney bus as a “failed program,” at its Aug. 17 meeting the borough council rejected NJ Transit’s preliminary offer for a new jitney bus to provide service to and from the Metuchen train station for the next seven years.
However, the current jitney bus will remain in service through at least the end of this year.
NJ Transit has asked the borough if it will be interested in receiving a new bus in exchange for agreeing to a seven-year commitment to use it. The borough, however, would have to pay for the maintenance of the bus and for its driver.
As reasons for their objection to the program, members of the council cited the nearly $48,000 annual cost of the bus and the bus’s history of frequent maintenance problems.
“Personally, I think it is a failed program and that it has failed for us in a number of ways,” said councilman Richard Dyas, referring to the current jitney bus. “I would absolutely put them off and say we are not taking it as of now. We will discuss it again in October after we speak to Keep Middlesex Moving. But I think it is a failed program and it should not go forward. We should not accept this bus under these conditions.”
The Borough Council agreed to first ask the county via Keep Middlesex Moving, (KMM), if it would be interested in establishing a regionalized bus service route rather than Metuchen operating one for only itself.
KMM is Middlesex County’s non-profit commuter service and transportation management association. The group says its mission is to “improve mobility and air quality and decrease congestion to increase quality of life.”
“I know Mr. Constantine’s proposed route also included Raritan Center and Menlo Mall,” said councilman Richard Weber, citing possible stops for an expanded regionalized bus. “I think that would really behoove Metuchen as a community.”
Borough planner Jim Constantine has also suggested JFK Medical Center as another stop on an expanded regional bus, if one is ever established.
Borough Administrator William Boerth provided a summary of the current jitney bus agreement.
“The original program was that NJ Transit would provide municipalities including Metuchen with the bus,” Boerth said. “It costs about $47,000 to $48,000 per year. In the first year NJ Transit paid us $30,000, in the second it was $20,000, and in the third it was $10,000. After that we were on our own.”
“At the time it was felt that it was a good deal for the borough and it would help to get commuting traffic off the streets out of the downtown. The borough decided to go forward with the project,” he said.
“As the years passed, we had the opportunity to see how the program has been working, and depending on who you talk to, you would get a different answer as to the results,” Boerth said. “The problem that we have, since we are now shouldering the entire burden, is that the bus has been out of service a lot. When that happens, one of the two senior buses picks up the slack. However, they are old and tired.”
“The transit [jitney] bus is at the end of its useful life, essentially,” he said. “It requires more and more maintenance. It was not a well-designed bus to begin with, and we have had constant problems with it. The other problem we have had is that if the bus driver calls in sick or goes on vacation, public works has to pick up the slack, and on the evening route that is for the overtime rate.”
“I remember the first year or two the bus was in the garage more often than it was out of the garage,” added Mayor Thomas Vahalla.
Members of the council also said that it was their understanding that the current offer by NJ Transit is for only a new bus and nothing else – meaning that this time, there would not be three annual payments of $30,000, $20,000, and $10,000, as was the case in the original terms. The borough of Metuchen would also be responsible for paying for the driver and maintenance of the new bus.
Another concern raised at the meeting was that some students in the Metuchen public school system use the bus as a way to get to school.
“One of the issues that we’ve had is that there are a lot of students that ride the bus,” Boerth said. “The [police] chief has actually raised some liability questions concerning that. They aren’t considerable, but as with everything, there is always a liability issue and the expense that you go to resolve them is key there.”
Councilman Justin Manley said that if the borough did discontinue the jitney bus, it would give adequate notice to the school district so they could plan for any student transportation issues that might arise.
“We are aware that a lot of students are using this,” Manley said. “We should give notice in some form to the board of education that if we cut it off, then they may be dealing with the consequences of that which are far greater than we might. There may be parents who will be upset who don’t know it is a town bus versus a board of education bus. We should get notice to them so that they know how to deal with it and are not caught off-guard.”
Boerth offered his conclusion that though the NJ Transit jitney bus was “an interesting experiment,” Metuchen should no longer be “in the transit business.”
“We do transport others, such as seniors, because those people in most instances have no other [cheap] way, which is why we have a senior bus,” Boerth said. “But I’m not sure the municipality should be involved in doing what I consider to be NJ Transit’s function. If they want to get more people to the train stations, which I think is a good goal, then they should bear more of the cost.”
“The program was initially sold as, ‘We’ll give you a bus, help you to get started, and then you can use the bus however you wanted to.’ But that never worked because the schedule always overlapped with the senior program and because the bus always had so many mechanical problems, it has never been used for anything except as the NJ Transit bus. So the main benefit NJ Transit was selling at the time was here you have this bus you can use for the rest of the day, but it never worked here in Metuchen.”
