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By RICHARD PEARSALL
Courier-Post Staff
RIVERSIDE
First in a series
Sitting behind the old Zurbrugg Hospital is a mock-up of the kind of light rail car that is expected to begin trundling up and down the riverfront from Camden to Trenton by the start of 2003.
Supporters of the Southern New Jersey Light Rail Transit System see the car and conjure images of happy commuters riding by revitalized downtowns.
Critics see a billion-dollar boondoggle.
A three-month Courier-Post investigation of the 34-mile project, now under construction, found a rail line born more out of politics than need - a mass transit project that faces trouble down the line in the form of low ridership and high subsidies that could doom any proposals to solve South Jersey's more pressing transportation problems.
"They knew they needed to spend more money in South Jersey, to offset the billions they were spending on transit projects in North Jersey," said James Dunn, a Rutgers-Camden professor who is an expert on transportation issues. "This was the path of least resistance."
Once conceived, the project was steered away from outside review.
And when it came time to finance it, the state turned to some financial sleight-of-hand that bypassed the voters, the Legislature and even the Transportation Trust Fund, the usual source of state transit funding, the newspaper found. It is an example of the kind of borrowing the Whitman administration used to avoid tax increases.
John Pucher, a professor of urban policy at Rutgers-New Brunswick, "a political boondoggle to satisfy the voters of South Jersey."
•NJ Transit decided to build the light rail line in one of the region's less-congested areas on the basis of a study lasting less than two months, pushing aside two routes into more congested areas of South Jersey that had been studied for three decades.
•The line was declared feasible by an engineering firm that went on to hire the state transportation commissioner and design the line.
•Ridership projections are low - about 4,500 riders a day when the system starts operating, which is less than one-fourth the number who ride PATCO's Hi-Speedline from Lindenwold to Philadelphia.
•The line will start in Camden at an entertainment complex it cannot serve because its cars have to be off the line by 10 p.m. to make way for freight trains, which will have sole overnight use of the tracks. Most events at the Tweeter Center don't end until after 11 p.m.
It will end a mile short of the State House and other government buildings at least for its first two years in operation. An extension is being studied.
•The line will have more miles than any light rail line in the country. Light rail lines do best over short distances because the cars don't travel so fast as heavy rail and stop much more frequently.
South Jersey will have the only light rail system in the country that has received neither federal funds nor federal oversight. It will cost $800 million in state funds to build and operate for 10 years, and more than $1 billion by the time financing charges are included. By comparison, 90 percent of the federally reviewed Hudson-Bergen line now operating between Bayonne and Jersey City will be federally funded.
South Jersey could pay an additional price. If the line fails, transportation experts say, it is likely to be many years before the state invests again in South Jersey mass transit, no matter how jammed roads become in Gloucester County or through Burlington County's more congested corridors, including Route 73.
The only way the line can succeed, both supporters and critics say, is by encouraging more people to move into the riverfront corridor.
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By all accounts, the riverfront route was the brainchild of the late state Sen. William Haines, a Republican from Mount Laurel. He came up with the idea in the summer of 1995 as opposition grew to two other routes - one out through Gloucester City and Woodbury to Glassboro, in Gloucester County; the other through the heart of Burlington County to Mount Holly, which residents of Moorestown opposed.
The popular lawmaker was determined that state train money earmarked for South Jersey not escape to the North. As chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee and a longtime Republican legislator from a Republican county, Haines had clout with the Whitman administration.
On Nov. 26, 1996, the board of NJ Transit voted to proceed with a riverfront line instead of either of the two other routes out of Camden.
Haines could not have accomplished his objective without the cooperation of the Whitman administration and the can- do pragmatism of its transportation commissioner, Frank Wilson.
As head of both the state transportation department and NJ Transit, the state's public transportation corporation, Wilson had the powers of a transportation czar. Impatient with the traditional way of building mass transit lines - long studies, applications for federal money, government control over both construction and operation - he pushed the riverfront project through in record time with minimal study.
In a recent interview, Wilson defended the process that led from long-studied routes to a little-studied one in 1996.
"They kept studying the possibilities in South Jersey every 10 years or so," Wilson said. "You have to look at the dynamics here. Enough is enough. Planning is wonderful, but to what end? If the ideal solution can't happen, then you have to ask `What is a sub-optimal solution, but still a great one?'
"These kind of investments bring the the shortsighted and the visionary into sharp contrast," he said. "They are 100- year investments. You have to look at them in that context."
One week after NJ Transit approved the riverfront line, Wilson (who had abstained from the vote) left the agency to take a job as a corporate vice president with Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, the Los Angeles-based engineering and construction services firm that had declared the riverfront line feasible after a study completed in June 1996.
DMJM, or "dim jim" as it's known because of its initials, went on to design the South Jersey line and do more work that will net it $72 million by the time the trolleys begin running. It won this work through a competitive process in which bids are evaluated by a team of technical experts within NJ Transit.
Wilson went on to become president and chief executive of DMJM.
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Stretched between two old cities, Camden and Trenton, the riverfront corridor is a mix of small Victorian towns and old industrial centers.
The area grew with manufacturing and still has a surprising number of smokestack industries in pockets from Cinnaminson to Florence, plants such as Hercules chemical and Hoeganaes Corp., a metals processor.
But the riverfront's fortunes declined as factories closed and people began looking elsewhere for more room in which to live and work. By the 1970s, the corridor's growth had ground to a halt even as new corridors, with more land and newer highways, were exploding. Old farming communities such as Mount Laurel and Washington Township became suburbs. The office buildings of the new economy rose next to highways like routes 38 and 73 and I-295, not the riverfront's Route 130.
Today, the region's worst traffic congestion occurs south of Camden, in one of the two corridors that became prime candidates for mass transit when the PATCO Hi- Speedline was completed in 1969.
Twenty-four hour traffic counts by the state Department of Transportation show a maximum of 50,000 cars on a weekday on the busiest section of Route 130, around Cinnaminson and Delran. But numbers closer to 135,000 have been recorded near the dreaded stretch where Route 42, I- 295 and I-76 merge. The intersection has made the number 42 as well known to Delaware Valley radio traffic listeners as the Schuylkill Expressway through Philadelphia or the Blue Route through the city's Pennsylvania suburbs.
Susan Saridakis of Woodbury used to travel Route 42 to drop her children at day care before heading to work in Philadelphia. But "unless you leave before 6:30, you're going to be in trouble. You can't get onto 42," she says. " I was very disappointed when they decided not to push for the line into Gloucester County."
Richard Harris, director of the Walter Rand Institute for Public Affairs at Rutgers-Camden, said the cause of mass transit in South Jersey could be set back years if the light rail project does not succeed.
"I think the line's under a real burden to demonstrate some kind of short-term success," he said.
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The decision to switch to the riverfront came quickly. And after getting NJ Transit's endorsement, the route underwent no review by federal regulators, planners or other outside experts.
The Federal Transit Administration did not review the plans because federal funds were not sought. And with the FTA out of the process, NJ Transit also cut out the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, the FTA's designated planning organization for the region.
In the months before the NJ Transit board endorsed the project, a state legislative committee twice took public comments on the riverfront route, once in North Jersey and the second time in Mount Holly. The session in North Jersey was a joint meeting with the transit board.
But the meetings NJ Transit set up with riverfront residents after its 1996 vote were only to give out information, not gather input. And the state bypassed New Jersey residents on the bond issue used to finance the line.
NJ Transit's own planning department was cut out of the process when Wilson created an Office of New Rail Construction within NJ Transit and gave it exclusive control over this and the Hudson-Bergen light rail project in North Jersey.
A review of NJ Transit board minutes for 1996 also shows no discussion of the South Jersey proposal, except for a few brief comments shortly before a 4-0 vote endorsing the project. NJ Transit declined to release minutes of a board subcommittee that studied the route, saying they are not a matter of public record.
Jeffrey Zupan, a former planning director for NJ Transit who is now with the Regional Planning Association, a New York based-consulting firm, complained bitterly at the time about the way the riverfront corridor was approved.
"It's very clear to me that if it did have to be matched up against other projects in New Jersey and others in the nation," he said during early planning for the line, "it would not have survived the (review) process and found funding."
Today he says the line's success will depend on building high-density housing within walking distance of the train stations.
The South Jersey line is being built by a Bechtel Group Inc.-led consortium under a "design, build, operate and maintain" contract. NJ Transit will pay the consortium $15. 1 million a year to operate the system over 10 years.
NJ Transit says fares will be comparable to bus fares, but declined to speculate on how much revenue it will recover from the farebox.
PATCO, which just increased fares, is now recovering 72 percent of its expenses from the farebox, an exceptionally high rate. Fifty percent is considered very good in the commuter rail industry.
The line from Philadelphia to Atlantic City recovers about 20 percent. The Hudson-Bergen line is recovering just 10 percent one year after opening.
Nearly a dozen dozen transportation officials - from government, academia and private industry - interviewed about the South Jersey light rail project, said the ridership the riverfront line is likely to attract does not justify the investment. The most optimistic of them view the line as a gamble.
Many of those experts declined to be identified. They cited a fear of offending colleagues working on the project, damaging their futures in a field in which people routinely jump from one sector to another, or hurting the cause of mass transit in general.
Shirley DeLibero, executive director of NJ Transit when the line was conceived and approved, declined to speak about the project from her new post with the transit authority in Houston.
Frank Russo, who headed the Office of New Rail Construction that was in charge of overseeing the line, also declined to comment. He is now in the private sector. So did Amy Rosen, vice chairwoman of the NJ Transit board when it approved the line and chairwoman of the subcommittee that reviewed the plans. Rosen now serves on Amtrak's board.
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The rationale for the line has shifted since 1996. Before it was approved, the emphasis was on providing more mass transit for South Jersey. Afterward the focus was on the system's ability to generate economic development in the river towns.
Mark Remsa, Burlington County's chief planner, said he has no doubt that people will use it - not just to get to Camden and Trenton, but also to catch trains to Philadelphia and New York. In the process, he said, they will contribute to the revitalization of the riverfront communities.
State Sen. Diane Allen, R-Burlington, who took over as the line's chief proponent in the Legislature after Haines died, said that all the benefits may not be immediately apparent, but will materialize eventually.
"Are we in a dire situation now? No," she said. "We're being wise. We're building this line before we get to that point."
Allen said she sees the elderly, the disabled and the young as immediate beneficiaries.
"We wouldn't have put a new `Y' in Burlington City if there wasn't a light rail," she said.
"And this has always been more than a way to move people," she said. "It's a way to promote economic development."
Looking at the low ridership projections, Rutgers' Pucher asked, "Why would you think that a line that isn't used is going to stimulate development?"
Tony D'Agostino has been cutting hair across from the railroad tracks in Riverside for 43 years. He dearly hopes the line will help. But he doesn't see it happening.
"Who's going to ride it? That's the big question. That's what everyone wants to know."