The long way home

Originally published in the Gloucester County Times on May 6, 2007, but lost to website redesign.

The lumbering 402 rolls to a halt, its brakes screeching as the driver pulls close to an unmarked bus stop in the middle of the block.

It's 4:04 p.m. at the edge of Logan Township's Pureland Industrial Park and three people board the New Jersey Transit bus, bound — like most regional buses — for Woodbury.

For many workers at the Northeast's largest industrial park, the 402 is the only way out. Find yourself standing in the middle of Beckett Road 10 minutes too late, and you'd better prepare yourself for a long wait. The next bus won't roll by till 6:58 p.m.

As the 402 lurches forward, it shudders from side to side slightly off balance, and Westville resident William Graham begins to knock off his list of complaints with a wry sense of humor and a smile.

"You miss the bus out here, you are done," he said. "You better go in the woods and make friends with the rabbits for a nap."

Graham has been riding the 402 for about a week, ever since J.E. Berkowitz moved its operation down to Pedricktown just over the county line in Salem County.

Used to working the second shift, Graham now finds himself waking up at 4:30 a.m. to catch the 5:24 a.m. bus out of Westville.

It rolls into the Beckett section of Logan Township at 6:10 a.m., some 50 minutes before his shift begins, but the next bus won't come until quarter after seven.

He pulls a 10-hour shift before waiting for the bus home, killing another hour on the commute. In the end, his job ­ and commuting to it ­ consumes more than 12 hours of his day.

Like many along the 402's afternoon route, Graham depends on New Jersey Transit for transportation to and from work.

But the agency's routing system, with its an antiquated map of bus routes running into a central Woodbury hub, offers little help.

Take one look at NJ Transit's "Connections" map, and the pitfalls of the routing system are clearly laid out in bright green arrows.

A jumble of north-to-south routes feed into Woodbury before shooting north on a common route to Camden and Philadelphia. Connections east to west, between towns that might share a border, are almost nonexistent.

All too often, this routing makes a trip that should take 10 minutes drag on to an hour or more as commuters ride first north, then back down south, to reach their destinations.

Living in Westville, this problem doesn't affect Graham, who is able to board the 402 and ride it straight to his neighborhood.

But what if Graham laid his head in Swedesboro?

The bus stop on Kings Highway is about a 7-minute drive down Center Square Road from the 402's stop on the edge of Pureland.

On the bus, though, traveling from Swedesboro to Pureland means riding north to Woodbury before walking south to the intersection of Broad and Hunter streets to catch the southbound 401 ­ which, on Thursday afternoon, inexplicably arrived either 20 minutes too early or half an hour too late on each run.

Aboard the bus, the air hung quiet as exhausted passengers rode in silence at the end of their work day ­ some staring ahead, some glancing out the massive windows.

Outside, Woodbury's urban facade peeled back to make way for strip malls and blocky, unadorned farmhouses.

A few miles along the route, a forest of sprawling prefab developments was broken by a massive brown field before flipping back to familiar white-sidewalked suburbia.

An hour and a half later, the big bus idled at the Swedesboro stop on Kings Highway. The hunger-inducing aroma of fried food and cheese from Pat's Pizzeria wafted through the open windows.

Three and a half miles away sat the starting point, the NJ Transit stop in neighboring Logan Township. If you walked back, you could make the 402's 6:58 p.m. stop to complete the circuit.

"The bus service routes are lined with ridership demand that historically and currently have Woodbury as a focal point," explained NJ Transit spokesman Joe Dee. "The bus routes and the alignment in Gloucester County, as they exist now, match the service demand in the most efficient way we can right now."

According to Dee, NJ Transit monitors the population growth in Gloucester County, realigning bus routes to serve new population centers.

But the fact is that much of Gloucester County doesn't have the population density to demand east-to-west bus routes. By sending all buses either to Woodbury or to Camden, NJ Transit taps into the potential for Philadelphia traffic, justifying their routes.

"We are very aware of the (county's) growth, and we are constantly monitoring that," said Dee, "but right now, the ridership ­ the concentration isn't there yet to justify new routes that would eliminate the trip up to Woodbury."

James Dunn, a professor of political science at Rutgers-Camden, wraps up the woes of public transportation as the problems of a system still holding onto methods proven useful many years ago.

"Public transportation does not function well from the point of view of convenience, economics and financial stability in a decentralized, sprawling, low-density environment," Dunn said. "If you look at how public transportation is set up today, it is basically dependent upon routes that were developed back when most people did not own an automobile and they needed public transportation to get out of walking distance."

Calling for a new perspective that utilizes shared cars, jitneys and taxis to address individual demand across a suburban environment, Dunn urged transportation authorities to adapt to the times.

"The conundrum of public transportation is ... to compete with the automobile for customers," he said. "It is a little bit like trying to sell an old Underwood typewriter as the main means of communication in a networked communication environment."

NJ Transit's attempt to serve Pureland illustrates Dunn's point.

A massive 3,000-acre industrial complex situated off Interstate 295, Pureland employs a huge work force from across the region.

Yet, despite this abundance of potential riders, Pureland is only serviced by one bus, the 402.

"Pureland does present some challenges," explained Dee. "It is a very large employment center, but people start their shifts at so many different times of the day and there are people coming from such a wide geographic area that the service that we provide is the most efficient we can do."

Challenged by a concentrated work force that commutes to homes scattered across the region, NJ Transit cannot adapt traditional bus routes to fit all of the workers' needs.

An updated model of public transportation would help.

"Get rid of the Underwood typewriters and get public transportation that works more like a networked computer," urged Dunn.