Sometimes writing a story is like pulling teeth. You agonize for days on what angle to take to best represent the topic. And then there are places like New Jersey Transit where the story just writes itself. As I rode in from the Newark airport the night before I interviewed New Jersey Transit's executive director, George Warrington, I saw a billboard proclaiming, "Newark's Best Kept Secret!" The sign was one of many in the area touting the new light rail line between Newark Penn Station and the Broad Street Station. Now you could take the light rail to Penn Station and get on the train from there it said. I thought this was a pretty interesting advertising angle, and after spending a few days in New Jersey traveling the system's length and breadth, I realized that the ad people didn't realize what they had when they came up with that tag line. Newark's best-kept secret wasn't just the new light rail line, it was the entire wonderful transit system that it was a part of.
FROM THE BEGINNING
For most people in the public transportation industry, especially the executives, it's not a vocation, it's a life choice. Transit gets into your blood. I've heard that from more than a few people since coming to Mass Transit. I agree. I can see it in the faces of the people I see at agencies and industry events.
So for most, when they get into transit they are in it for the long haul. But few have been with the same system since it was created and helped shape that system along the way. When NJ Transit started in 1979, George Warrington was 'the kid.' Fresh out of college at Syracuse University, he was looking for a job in the public sector that allowed him the opportunity to get tangible results from his work.
"I found that the transportation world was one of those places where you could engage in public service, but also drive and measure results because of the nature of the business," says Warrington. "And it was also one of those opportunities to blend public service and the public sector with a business and the business side of an operation."
Warrington began with NJ Transit even before there was a transit system per se, getting a job with the New Jersey DOT in 1975 in what he calls the "bad old days."
"And back in those days, I call them the bad old days, the transit system in this state was operated by about 30 bankrupt private bus companies or near bankrupt private bus companies and bankrupt private railroads.
"All of whom were operating service under subsidy contract with the state in many instances. The system had been grossly undercapitalized for several decades. The fl eet on both the bus and rail side was probably averaging 40 or 50 years old. The rail fl eet certainly, and the bus fleet was in the 20- to 30-year realm. So the state of New Jersey was artificially propping up this bankrupt system. Reliability and customer service were virtually non-existent. And ridership and demand had been declining for many years."
This system would begin to change under New Jersey Gov. Brendon Byrne, who appointed Lou Gambaccini as the new DOT commissioner. Gambaccini, a national figure in the transit industry, who had already spent several decades in transit, would become Warrington's mentor for the next 25 years.
With service so poor that commuters began to rail for change, Gambaccini walked into a mess, but gathered a small team around him, including Warrington to address the problem.
"The very first report that we all worked on was Horace Yard, which described the horrible condition of the network and that then resulted in a series of white papers and policy papers leading up to a series of recommendations which called for the creation of a statewide transit agency."
This new statewide agency would be led by a seven member board of directors appointed by the governor and prove to be extraordinarily successful over the next two and a half decades.
Warrington is quick to point to the success of NJ Transit being in large part due to a commitment to capitalize it from the beginning.
"As NJ Transit began to transform the system, public policy-makers also recognized and devoted a lot of political capital to creating capital to invest in the system. In that sense we are the beneficiaries of public policy that has from the beginning realized the criticality of train.
"You might not know that in 1966 the NJ DOT was renamed, in fact, NJ then possessed the first DOT in the nation. And that symbolically signaled that there was a recognition that the role of a public agency devoted to transportation needed to extend beyond building and maintaining a highway network, but it needed to recognize that all the modes require substantial [funding].
"And we've been fortunate in the past 25 years that successive board chairmen who also serve as the commissioner have recognized the importance of planning an integrated way. That is a very unique occurrence across this country that the substantial transit operator is so well linked to transportation policy for this state that it always enables us to have a seat at the table as transportation policy decisions are being made."
Warrington stayed on board NJ Transit, rising to the position of vice president of rail operations, but his career in transit (and his path back to Newark) would be a winding one. He left NJ Transit in 1990 to become the deputy commissioner of the New Jersey DOT before becoming the president of the Delaware River Port Authority, president of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor Business Unit and eventually president of Amtrak itself.
AMTRAK
Coming from the Midwest, I thought of Amtrak as little more than a national service akin to an airline. When I got to NJ Transit, Warrington explained to me how important Amtrak and more specifically its Northeast Corridor is to the region and his transit system. Having once been president of Amtrak and its Northeast Corridor, I wanted to know what he had learned from holding that position.
"Immersing myself in the business of Washington was a very helpful experience. It enabled [me to learn] national transportation policy, national politics with respect to the railroads and transportation [and] how Washington policy and politics works," Warrington says.
"In a sense it widened me in terms of developing an appreciation for what buttons need to get pushed in order to enable things to happen both from a policy and a political point of view. And I was fortunate enough to develop professional relationships around policy, politics, regulatory affairs, all of which I draw on today, those experiences and those relationships."
Like me, Warrington developed an understanding for the importance of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor. And he says that it was that understanding and the appreciation he gained working there that helped him realize the importance of Amtrak not as just the nation's passenger rail service, but its importance to NJ Transit because so much of the system's service links to the Northeast Corridor.
"In many respects our business is highly dependent upon the Northeast Corridor. And having an appreciation for Amtrak the organization and the Northeast Corridor, gives me an opportunity to better understand, plan, develop and to manage and advocate for our operation."
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
As George Warrington will tell you location is key. This could never be more apparent than for NJ Transit, which developed as a bedroom community for midtown Manhattan, or as Warrington puts it, "the center of the universe."
One doesn't have to look far to realize this when in New Jersey. Standing in the offices of NJ Transit, I could see the Manhattan skyline. The Hoboken station is right across the water from it. This proximity to the gravity well of transit, New York City, would necessitate being able to handle the daily commuter influx, and that's what NJ Transit has been built to do. Its fastest growing segments are easily its interstate services to Manhattan, both bus and rail.
"Obviously those services took a bit of a dip from 9/11, but the good news is that we have not only recovered from that, but we've surpassed where we were pre-9/11 substantially," says Warrington.
According to Warrington, within the region that NJ Transit operates in there has been acceleration of the decade's long growth of jobs in midtown Manhattan and along the New York/New Jersey waterfront. This acceleration has sparked the creation of affordable housing in the area surrounding Manhattan, including Rockland, Orange, Bergen, Passaic, Morris, Essex, Union, Somerset, Middlesex, Mammoth, Ocean and Mercer counties. This growth even extends as far south as suburban Philadelphia.
This substantial housing growth has shifted today where the area west of the Hudson River is in far more demand from the entire region. This puts the pressure on NJ Transit to provide the service and meet the demands of ridership looking for daily trips into Manhattan.
"So your question is where is the growth? The growth is around all of our services that are destined for Manhattan," Warrington says.
Warrington points out the added benefit to having your core driver being peak period trips to Manhattan is that it lets you increase the frequency of all intrastate service.
"What that enables you to do is run a frequency of service that makes utilizing the system for intrastate travel that much more attractive. So you almost get a two-fer. Your principle driver is the Manhattan market, but the benefi ciaries become all of those folks who would like to travel and connect within the state.
"Beyond that we've also overlaid on that Manhattan orientation a substantial amount of local intrastate investment in high density locations like the Hudson County light rail line," says Warrington, noting that this New York orientation has allowed them to focus on moving folks in high density populations locally within New Jersey and create a fairly extensive system of intrastate connections.
"We've spent the past 25 years on the commuter railroad system, making more and more connections," says Warrington. "Back to my earlier comment about seven bankrupt railroads that we inherited, our challenge and our focus from day one when we acquired all that service was to better integrate what had been competitive operations, so that the railroad system behaved like a system."
The creation of this system (which would in turn become the modern NJ Transit) saw the creation of connections to Amtrak's Northeast Corridor to provide more frequent and faster service to Manhattan, but eventually the system hit a ceiling.
"We've reached the point today where we've stretched all of that capacity to its practical limit," says Warrington. "And it's the reason why I came back here four or five years ago.
"It was very clear to me that our biggest challenge is growth and our biggest challenge is capacity and that in order to continue to stay ahead of the curve with respect to housing, population, employment and transit utilization, we need railroad train carrying capacity in the system and the only way to do that is to double the size and capacity of the railroad from Newark to New York."
To double this capacity, NJ Transit has begun work on its next big connection to New York City, THE (Trans-Hudson Express) Tunnel, which will expand the connection between the Secaucus Junction, Penn Station New York and the new 34th Street Station. But Warrington says that building THE Tunnel is much more than just doubling the amount of trains that can service Manhattan in peak periods.
"In many respects while we define this project as THE Tunnel, it is really a systemic capacity expansion project that extends from track and platform capacity in Manhattan under the river, through the Meadowlands and beyond virtually into Newark where we are going to increase the carrying capacity."
The project is well underway, with the environmental process being tackled currently. The preliminary engineering work has already begun and the major work looks to begin in 2008 and 2009 with the project planned to be completed by 2016.
"It's an aggressive timetable, but it requires us to be very aggressive given what's at stake," says Warrington.
TRANSIT BACKBONE
With so much of its system being focused on providing access to Manhattan, NJ Transit seems to have a backbone built on the legacy of historic Eastern seaboard rail networks. While its rail system may give it structure, George Warrington was quick to point out how important its bus system is to the overall plan.
"I would say that the railroad is physically ingrained in hundreds of municipalities and downtowns," says Warrington. "So in that sense the railroad in its physical existence is a system that every community touches."
Offering a connection to a community's past, the rail system invokes a sense of pride in those towns it stops in, but Warrington is quick to point out that while the rail system may be the bones of NJ Transit, its bus system - one of the nation's largest - is its lifeblood.
"[The bus system] carries a substantially greater number of people than the railroad," says Warrington. "But since it doesn't have that same physical presence, you know, that exists with a commuter railroad - to really own it as a community - it doesn't have the same level of connection to communities that the rail system does.
"On the other hand, the bus system in many of our large urban centers and very high density commercial locations like Newark, Jersey City, Hudson County, Camden and many of our other larger cities, is absolutely vital and does connect with those communities in order to bring people to work. In that sense the bus system is the lifeblood of the community."
For NJ Transit its bus and rail systems play very different roles in the communities they service. With that understanding in mind, George Warrington is the first to point out that he and, more importantly, the agency understands those roles and the importance of each mode of transportation in the larger scheme of things.
"The bus system and the rail system both play equally important roles in the state and they both have received substantial capital investments in order to both modernize the systems and expand the systems," says Warrington. "As a matter of fact, I would say over the past several years since I've been back, on the railroad we've added on an average daily basis more than 100 trains, and on the bus system we've added literally hundreds and hundreds of trips for local bus service.
"So my point is that both the bus system, the rail system, and increasingly the light rail system play very important roles in the economy of the state and in the communities that they serve."
LIGHT RAIL ATTACHMENT
While NJ Transit may have been built on the back of commuter rail lines, it's increasingly the light rail lines that are getting all the love. In fact, taking the light rail to the commuter train station is being billed as the system's best-kept secret. Add to that the RiverLine and Hudson-Bergen lines and you have what may be the system's fastest growing segments.
This growth has sparked growth around the systems as well. In Hudson County, almost 4,500 housing units have sprung up within walking distance of the light rail line in the last six years. Warrington notes that there is a clear link between the Hudson-Bergen line and the economic growth around it - pride.
"[It] is proudly owned by the communities. Similarly here in Newark, the new light rail extension is proudly owned by the city of Newark and our new mayor, Corey Booker," says Warrington.
Warrington says that when NJ Transit opened the RiverLine, which connects Camden and Trenton, there was similar growth. The light rail line became "a very significant driver of economic growth, business attraction, commercial development and residential development.
"In that sense, the municipalities through which it operates also take a lot of pride in the opportunity and the role that having that railroad in their downtown brings to those [communities.] It's one of the reasons why there isn't a municipality that wouldn't love one day to have a railroad station in town because it can transform it."
But Warrington is quick to point out that this expansion hasn't been without growing pains. While every capital investment is made for the overall public good, says Warrington, it's common for issues to come up, but he says these are very localized issues, issues NJ Transit works hard with the communities to overcome.
"One of the things we do, and I think do quite well, is work very closely with communities when we do capital investments," says Warrington. "We work very closely with communities, local elected officials, neighborhood groups, environmental groups, commuter advocates to be sure that we are designing and developing the service with whatever mitigation measures are necessary in order to make a project as palatable as possible when there are 'not in my backyard' issues."
NJ Transit has, Warrington says, developed a reputation for being a responsive organization.
TRANSIT FRIENDLY PLANNING
Throughout its system, NJ Transit has shown a dedication towards transit-oriented development, which it calls "transit friendly planning." This can be clearly seen all along the Hudson-Bergen line, as well as the RiverLine and the Hoboken Terminal to name a few places. George Warrington says NJ Transit understands the benefits of smart growth and utilizing transit friendly planning to organize development in and around downtowns and train stations, but to also use it to revitalize some of the system's older downtowns.
"And it's really a fascinating phenomenon that has been occurring, with a little bit of help from the state of New Jersey, but more interesting than that there are a lot of natural market forces, which are nice to see, that are gravitating to downtowns and train stations. And what's nice is that the development community is naturally recognizing the value associated with commercial viability associated with development adjacent to the transit system in New Jersey," Warrington says.
Warrington has worked with the DOT and governor's office to encourage this growth through cooperative planning with municipalities and development communities to create what he calls a nexus around downtowns and train stations.
"In the end it brings downtowns back to life, it creates economic and private sector investment in some of your older downtowns, it enables your publicly supported infrastructure to be capitalized upon," says Warrington.
"And it induces transit demand and ridership and pedestrian traffic as opposed to auto traffic and parking and all that. So at many levels it's an excellent program that captures the best of public investment as a baseline infrastructure investment and it encourages private investment in and around it in order to take advantage of the already existing infrastructure."
Warrington says this is a different condition that has developed over the last 20 years. Two decades ago downtowns were dying out as private industry pushed to the suburbs and even ex-urban locations with the investment in strip malls and commercial office developments.
The transit system found these locations very difficult to support and it also placed a burden on the road network, causing the proliferation of capital investment into roadway expansions. Warrington notes that the state of New Jersey can only afford a certain amount of what he calls this irrational expansion of infrastructure.
"So you've seen a sort of turnaround occur over the past 20 years or so and the good news is that it's been happening naturally. And in the end it's a much more efficient utilization of transportation resources to concentrated development in and around train stations and downtowns," says Warrington.
Warrington points out the window to make his point, saying that evidence of that can be found next door to the NJ Transit headquarters at Newark Penn Station where focus has been concentrated on rebuilding the downtown area from there to Broad Street Station, which is currently being renovated.
Much like the state highway and road system, which has been refocused on rebuilding existing development, NJ Transit has become focused on expansion and investment into its existing infrastructure. Warrington says that he would like to think that their investment in the recently opened light rail line between the two stations had something to do with that, but it is clear that Newark and other older municipalities around that urban core are benefiting from the investment.
SYSTEM MANAGEMENT
With a transportation industry history spanning more than three decades and after holding high-ranking positions in several agencies, including heading up NJ Transit and Amtrak, I asked George Warrington what he had learned about running a transit agency that other executives could benefit from. His answer was a simple one, keep in touch, but stay above the fray.
"One of the things that Lou Gambaccini taught me was that one of the challenges and requirements of good management is being able to keep your pulse on the day-to-day-operation, because it gets away from you real fast, but at the same time don't allow yourself to get consumed by the day-to-day clutter, too."
Warrington explained that maintaining that eye on your day-to-day operation allows you to know what's going on in your business, but it can be time-consuming - you mustn't let the day-to-day distract you from your mid- and long-term goals.
"It's a fine art and science to understand where that balance is, and how and when to apply that balance," says Warrington.
Although his background is strictly from the rail side of the business, Warrington says his management skills are something that form a unified approach no matter what mode you are governing.
"Frankly that kind of style and approach to business is something that is as applicable to bus operations as it is to light rail operations. The other thing that is adaptable here, that you learn in the railroad business, is that customers come first. And customer service, the internal and external communication, is absolutely vital. And that political responsiveness is absolutely vital as a public agency."
Warrington goes on to say that the core competencies he believes in as a manager are applicable to any aspect of the business. His grounding may be in the railroad business, but he has adapted as he learned and realizes that the same challenges exist whether you are looking at railroad, bus or light rail operations, and that the same approaches to business are applicable across all modes.
WHAT'S NEXT
While THE Tunnel may be the biggest project looming on the horizon for NJ Transit, its CEO, George Warrington knows that it's just a piece of the much larger puzzle that is the agency's future.
"As I said on the commuter railroad system, it's all about creating additional capacity, and with that capacity we will extend the reach of the system to more extensions of existing service or in some instances new alignments, high density locations that don't have the benefit of railroad service today," says Warrington.
He admits that while they move forward with work on THE Tunnel, they have already begun planning environmental work and engineering of other parts of the system in anticipation of the increased capacity afforded them by the completion of THE Tunnel project.
This also includes introducing some new and innovative concepts for the bus system to speed it up and provide more service.
One example the system is looking into that was "pulled from a substantial corridor planning exercise that we've been engaged in on buses is a defined bus rapid transit plan that would be integrated into the system. That is very exciting for us," says Warrington.
The other advancement being worked on is a comprehensive system review, the first of which that has been done of the system since the early 1980s. Warrington notes that the development patterns have changed dramatically over the last 20 years. He says that the agency is looking at adding hot lanes in Newark and other locations with the overall goal of modernizing the network and the system itself.
BACK IN THE DAY
Back in what he calls, the "bad old days" George Warrington was the "kid" who did whatever he was called on to do, including running checks to the FRA when NJ Transit first purchased the Hoboken Terminal. But he has come a long way from the kid who worked under Lou Gambaccini in his first tenure at NJ Transit as has the system he now runs. Warrington has seen the system grow and change around him as he developed his own sense of the transportation industry.
Now back in charge of the agency he was a part of developing, he hopes to apply the skills he has learned to not just keep the trains running on time, but to keep advancing the system and have it be on the leading edge of the industry's best-kept secrets.
