If you ride New Jersey Transit you already know that lately the service to New York City is becoming problematic at its best and downright unreliable at its worst.

Even our incoming Governor, Phil Murphy, has noticed and called the agency a national disgrace. He also has called for the heads of New Jersey Transit to step down as he has no confidence in them.

Many of the trains have been shorted cars and also they are missing triple decker cars. This makes for trains that can never handle the rush hour demands of the commuters who ride these trains. To make matters even worse is the state of the equipment, many of the cars are out of service because they need to be repaired. Why you might ask do they need to be repaired? The facts are that the government of New Jersey has not been spending money wisely and choosing instead to delay needed regular maintenance to save money.

And to make matters even worse Amtrak who owns and maintains tracks used by New Jersey Transit at Penn Station has a massive repair project going on, abet most of the work being down on the weekends. Again another agency, federal this time, has not been doing the necessary day to day work to maintain the rail system which is used by so many people to get to New York City.

But New Jersey Transit has made things worse because of inept management of the meager resources that the state legislature grants the agency. Our politicians need to realize that their stupidity does cause massive problems for the commuting public that what could have been fixed easily in the short term, now will require massive amounts of money and time to get people to work on time.

I for one do not want to be in the incoming governor’s shoes, for he will have to quickly fix this situation otherwise he will be the one blamed for this mess instead of the outgoing governor, Chris Christie.

When will the politicians realize that cutting corners by not spending money on maintaining equipment equals chaos for the commuting public. It is high time to give more priority to our public transit systems instead of letting them deteriorate to the point of near useless. In closing I do have to point out that if the system were in private hands I think that the neglect of equipment maintenance would have been far worse, for they would have to show a profit which New Transit does not have to do.

That is my opinion- Jumpin Jersey Mike