Aaron Gordon, Surya Mattu, and Marie Patino are reporters at Bloomberg News.

"NJ Transit Is NYC’s Least Reliable Commuter Rail — By a Long Shot"

NJ Transit, Metro-North, and the LIRR are crucial arteries into Manhattan, moving hundreds of thousands of commuters into the Financial District and Midtown every day. As New York City faces a housing affordability crisis, the railroads are critical to the city’s future as the region seeks to build more densely near train stops. But one of those commuter railroads, NJ Transit, is significantly less reliable than the others. To understand the frequency of significant delays on New York commuter lines, Bloomberg tracked more than 190,000 trains this summer using live transit feeds, the kind used by navigation apps such as Google Maps. The results show NJ Transit riders had more issues than their New York and Connecticut counterparts. About one in every 18 NJ Transit trains was delayed by at least 15 minutes or canceled completely in May, June and July. For an average commuter, that meant a bad commute roughly every two weeks, versus once every three months or more on the more reliable lines to New York and Connecticut suburbs.

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Elif Ensari is a Research Scholar at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, where she works with the Transportation and Land Use group. Her research focuses on the costs of building passenger rail, ridership estimation, transit-oriented development, and New York City’s walking and cycling infrastructure.

Elif will present “Eye in the Sky: Harnessing AI to Monitor Police Response to Illegal Parking Complaints,” co-authored with Benjamin Arnav. Illegal parking clogs travel lanes, worsens gridlock, and blocks critical infrastructure, yet enforcement remains inconsistent. Using artificial intelligence and New York City DOT’s public camera feeds, the team developed an automated system to file 311 complaints and monitor police responses citywide. Their analysis revealed that over half of complaints were closed while vehicles remained illegally parked, and that only 3% resulted in tickets. These findings expose major enforcement gaps and point to the potential of automated ticketing and smarter street design to address chronic violations.

Joel Chapman (he/him) is a New York City-based disability advocate. He is the founder of Transit Access, a community dedicated to making transit navigable for disabled people. In addition to hosting meetups for disabled people to tackle unaddressed needs in riding public transit, transitaccess.org is also a web app centering the accessibility of the NYC subway. It shows exact locations of elevators and their real-time status on an interactive map, custom accessibility notes designed to ease the anxiety of traveling while disabled, and is a hub for anyone trying to follow the myriad changes the MTA is making in their accessibility between now and 2055, when the system will be 95% accessible (it is currently 26%). As the organization grows, Transit Access will expand to other cities.

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Ben McCarthy is an artist who learned to program in order to bring 3D models to life and visualize data in creative ways. Think of the subway as a massive kinetic sculpture, but until now, you’ve only been able to experience the system one car at a time, and often in the isolated darkness of a tunnel. My3DTrains is a subway centric transit app that allows New Yorkers to experience the full scale and complexity of the subway system while providing them with accurate routes and trip times. Stand clear of the closing doors, and come along for a breakdown of how to build a 3D transit app!