Dayna Nicles’ commute from Montclair, New Jersey, to Manhattan, where she works in customer service, should take roughly 45 minutes.

Instead, her trip in recent weeks has stretched as long as two-and-a-half hours, riddled by a spate of canceled trains and delays on New Jersey Transit, which is raising fares on Monday for the first time in nearly a decade.

“Every day, it’s delayed. Every day, they’re cancelled,” she said in an interview in New York Penn Station on a sweltering June afternoon, after the system suspended service to New York City because of overhead wire issues. She stood among hundreds of stranded commuters staring at video boards displaying what should have been departure statuses. Instead, each line was on “standby.”

“There’s just an excuse every day, yet they’re raising the ticket prices,” Nicles said.

The confluence of decades of underfunding, unusually hot weather and ageing infrastructure has led to a transit breakdown along the busiest rail corridor in the US. Experts warn that repeated delays and unreliable transit could cost the region’s residents and businesses, and threaten its economy. Further strain was added by Governor Kathy Hochul’s abrupt halt of New York’s congestion pricing plan, which had been expected to generate billions in revenue for much-needed improvements to New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

“As these delays add up, they start to lead to longer-term economic tolls and costs,” said Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association, a non-profit organisation focused on improving the economy and quality of life for the New York City area. “If you can’t rely on the service, then it doesn’t matter how nice the office is or what the amenities are.”

In the first five months of this year, three New Jersey Transit rail lines that are among its busiest saw the worst on-time performance on average since the same period before the pandemic, and cancelled trains across the railway are at a six-year high, according to system data analysed by Bloomberg. In the second half of June, at least four incidents suspended train service for hours due to Amtrak infrastructure-related issues, stranding thousands of passengers.

Governor Phil Murphy and NJ Transit CEO Kevin Corbett inherited “a decimated transit agency that was grossly underfunded,” said John Chartier, a spokesperson for the system.

Since they started in 2018, the service improvements are “quite dramatic,” he said, citing better on-time performance in 2023 compared to 2018, as well as a 32% improvement in cancellations. The 2023 on-time performance was “exceptionally impacted” by Amtrak, he said.

And now, NJ Transit riders are confronting higher fares with a 15% hike on all rail, bus and light-rail tickets effective Monday. US Representative Mikie Sherrill, who represents a district in North Jersey, called for the agency to pause the increase until service is more reliable.

The repeated breakdown in rail operations along the Northeast Corridor in June prompted New Jersey’s congressional delegation to ask the US Department of Transportation to investigate the incidents. They cited serious delays for riders at least 19 times in six weeks, according to a bipartisan letter to Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Gery Williams, Amtrak executive vice president of service delivery and operations, said the national passenger railroad is running inspections to investigate the breakdowns. Over the past three months, there’s been eight incidents that have involved overhead equipment, he said.

“The problem is half of those eight incidences occurred in the absolute worst place at the worst time and caused our customers a lot of pain,” Williams said. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Williams is referring to a short strip of railway between Newark, New Jersey, and New York City that shuttles thousands of people each day. The US East Coast commuter rail structure comes to a choke point at that juncture, where both NJ Transit and Amtrak trains have to pass through a century-old tunnel to enter Manhattan. Even a minor disruption to that fragile operation ripples across both agencies, causing headaches for riders from Washington, DC, to Boston.

Fixing that pinch point is a long and expensive process. The delayed US$16 billion rail tunnel project connecting the two states, known as the Gateway programme, is designed to relieve the congestion. Though the initiative won its final federal funding package in June, it isn’t expected to be completed for another 14 years.

Diana McLean has been commuting from New Jersey to her job as a pharmacist on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for more than two decades. Recently, she said she has to allot two hours to get into the city, which hurts her ability to care for her three children at home. McLean used to take a bus operated by DeCamp Bus Lines to work, but the company halted New Jersey-to-NYC commuter routes last year.

“It’s not improving - that’s all I know,” she said.

There has been a history of finger pointing between Amtrak and NJ Transit after major service disruptions. Amtrak owns and operates much of the track infrastructure that both agencies share. On Thursday, officials from both agencies announced they are working together to investigate and resolve infrastructure problems that caused recent meltdowns.

“The service has been unacceptable. That is a unanimous opinion,” Governor Murphy said during a press conference alongside Amtrak and NJ Transit officials. He said they will “commit everything we can” to solve the problems.

Late last week New Jersey lawmakers approved adding a 2.5% surtax on top of the state’s 9% corporate tax rate for the state’s largest businesses to help finance the transit system.

Once commuters arrive in New York City, some subway riders are also facing service delays. There were 319 major incidents holding up at least 50 subway trains this year through May, an approximately 50% jump from the same period in 2023, according to data from the MTA, which operates the city’s subways, buses and two commuter rail lines.

Aaron Donovan, a spokesperson for the MTA, attributed that increase to categories beyond the authority’s control like people on the tracks and medical emergencies.

Also, the subway system’s overall on-time performance has improved in recent years. About 81.6% of subways arrived at terminal locations within five minutes of their scheduled time, according to the 12-month average through May. That’s up from a low 62.5% 12-month average in early 2018, according to MTA data. Service on the MTA’s commuter lines is even better with on-time performance for the Long Island Rail Road at 94.5% in May and 97.8% for Metro North Railroad, based on 12-month averages, according to MTA data.

New York City’s subway system is more than a century old. The MTA’s strategy was to modernise its network by implementing a congestion pricing initiative that would bring in US$1 billion annually by charging motorists driving into Manhattan’s central business district. The agency planned to borrow against that revenue to raise US$15 billion to renovate subway signals, speed up trains, make more stations accessible and extend the Second Avenue subway to Harlem.

Hochul’s June 5 announcement to indefinitely pause the new tolling plan, which was set to begin June 30, leaves the MTA without that crucial funding source. The agency now plans to defer US$16.5 billion worth of infrastructure upgrades, including the Second Avenue extension and modernising subway signals from the 1930s. The MTA is also halting US$3 billion worth of work to keep the system in a state-of-good-repair.

That will only make it more difficult for the MTA to provide reliable service and attract more riders back, with some transit advocates warning the system may revert back to 2017’s infamous “Summer of Hell,” when chronic delays left customers waiting for hours.

Avoiding the subway doesn’t guarantee an easy commute. Average travel speeds for traffic in Manhattan’s midtown fell to 4.5 miles an hour in May, a record low for the month, according to Sam Schwartz, who monitors traffic trends in the city and served in New York City’s Department of Transportation.

Traffic on bridges and tunnels that connect New York and New Jersey has surpassed 2019 volumes, according to the MTA and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

“The biggest single loss from excess traffic congestion has been New York City’s most important asset, which is its productivity,” said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City. “It’s a situation that has only gotten worse.”

  - Bloomberg