“Philip Plotch, principal researcher with the Eno Center for Transportation, said NJ Transit trains on the Northeast Corridor run reliably only 86% of the time. While aging tunnels cause problems, decrepit signal and electrical wiring also trigger shutdowns. It’s a vulnerable network that’s not ready for a long, hot summer, Plotch warned.”
“’Kathy Hochul didn’t just kill congestion pricing in New York, she killed it across the country for a long time,” said Philip Plotch, the lead researcher for the Eno Center for Transportation, a think tank in Washington, and a manager for policy and planning at the M.T.A. from 1992 to 2005.'”
“Philip Mark Plotch, a principal researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington, notes that Hochul was not without options. ‘She could have said, ‘We’re going to phase this in and we’re going to start with trucks because we just want to test the technology,’” says Plotch. “Or she could have just said we’re just going to start it from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. and just at the very peak periods and see how it works there.'”“It’s not a ‘if you build it, they will come’ type of scenario,” Puentes said. “It would actually be fitting a need.”
“Election years are tough for controversial policies like congestion pricing, says Philip Plotch, a researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation. For a policy like that to move forward, all the stars have to align: a strong economy, political tailwinds, and a diverse coalition of supporters among business, labor, and environmental groups.”
“‘If you Googled it, it would just tell you to take the train,’ Plotch said. Not helpful. Instead, Plotch’s wife rode the subway north to the 96th Street station in Manhattan, where Plotch, a transportation expert who lives in Fair Lawn, picked her up by car.
‘That is somewhat inexcusable,’ Plotch, principal researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation, said in an interview. ‘Transportation agencies should provide state-of-the-art information,’Plotch said. ‘That’s not the kind of information that was available for my wife.'”
“People lived and worked in those areas, they shopped in those areas, people knew each other, people could walk from place to place in thriving downtowns, and there was a real sense of connection to your community — you weren’t reliant on cars,” Plotch said. “That’s the trolley car story.”
“It’s not a ‘if you build it, they will come’ type of scenario,” Puentes said. “It would actually be fitting a need.”
New York has by far the biggest transit system with the highest ridership in the U.S., and its leaders are uniquely attuned to the value of transit to the city and state, noted Philip Plotch, an Eno Center researcher who moderated the event. How can advocates make the case in other places?
“It’s not a ‘if you build it, they will come’ type of scenario,” Puentes said. “It would actually be fitting a need.”
Philip Plotch, the principal researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation and a Fair Lawn resident, said what’s happening now with the private bus operations is not so much a case of “history repeating itself,” but “more of it’s just a trend that hasn’t stopped over the past 100 years.”
“‘Politically what makes sense is money that is being paid by these New Jersey residents should go to improve transit services between the two states,’ said Philip Plotch, principal researcher at the Washington-based Eno Center for Transportation (and a resident of Gottheimer’s district).”
To understand why NJ Transit is facing a fiscal crisis, you have to go back to the agency’s founding, said Philip Mark Plotch, a Fair Lawn resident and a senior researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington-based nonprofit that shapes public debate on transportation issues…. Garett Shrode, a policy analyst at the Eno Center for Transportation, said NJ Transit and similar legacy transit systems, including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, still rely heavily on fares to balance their operating budgets — which is what doomed them when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
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