(Bloomberg) — New Jersey Transit is on the brink of a “huge crisis” as a train engineers strike threatens to upend commutes as early as May 16, according to US Representative Mikie Sherrill.
“Everybody has got to get back to the table,” Sherrill, a Democrat from North Jersey who is running for governor, said Friday in an interview with Bloomberg News. “I’m incredibly concerned that it would be a disaster for everyone.”
Union workers represented by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen voted last month to reject a wage agreement with NJ Transit, one of the nation’s largest public-transportation systems. Negotiations resumed on April 30.
NJ Transit officials have advised commuters to work from home if the strike kicks off, saying they would only be able to shuttle about 100,000 people by bus into New York every day. The agency typically operates more than 925,000 weekday trips across its rail, bus and lightrail platforms.
In order to meet the union’s demands, NJ Transit said it would either have to increase fares by 17% starting later this year, hike the corporate transit fee by 27% or make service reductions.
The strikes would intensify the service issues that have derailed commutes in and out of Manhattan for years. Many of those rail meltdowns have been caused by Amtrak, the inter-city US passenger rail service that leases tracks to NJ Transit.
“There’s a real lack of transparency” from Amtrak on its operations and how it’s working to fix the old rail infrastructure that’s impacting NJ Transit trains, said Sherrill, who is leading some polls in the Democratic primary race. She and other New Jersey lawmakers have pushed for answers from Amtrak about the root cause of last year’s commuter meltdowns along the Northeast Corridor.
“They are relying on this Gateway Tunnel project to fix everything,” she said, referring to the new Hudson River rail tunnel under construction and scheduled for completion in 2035. “They don’t want to do the upkeep in the near term.”
Sherrill, 53, a former US Navy helicopter aircraft commander, is the only woman in a crowded field in the June 10 Democratic primary.
NJ Transit has also had its fair share of funding challenges. Governor Phil Murphy enacted a corporate transit fee last year to help finance the system by generating an expected $815 million in fiscal 2026. Sherrill vowed to fully fund the system by boosting revenue through transit-oriented development and expanding advertising on the trains.
Business leaders and advocates across the state have expressed concerns that lawmakers will divert revenue from the surtax for purposes unrelated to funding NJ Transit.
“The transit fee that they’ve put in place, it’s not yet going to transit,” Sherrill said. “The first thing we should do is make it go to transit.”
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