By RICHARD PEARSALL
Courier-Post Staff
NJ Transit is so worried about ridership on the South Jersey Light Rail Line that it is considering making the service free, at least at the beginning, to encourage people to try the 34-mile Camden-to-Trenton line.
"Nothing is off the table," said NJ Transit Executive Director George Warrington.
The agency is considering a wide array of promotional strategies to encourage ridership when the nearly $1 billion line opens in mid-2003. Originally expected to begin service on New Year's Day 2003, the line is now set to open in the middle of the year.
In a wide-ranging interview Friday, Warrington and other state transportation officials painted the most gloomy picture yet of the light rail line, its role in serving mass transit needs and the money it will cost to operate and maintain.
The transportation officials blasted the project as a mistake inherited from the Whitman administration.
"We're going to do everything we can to make this line as successful as possible," Warrington said, "but it's a huge financial burden that is very troubling to me."
Preparing to testify before a legislative hearing Tuesday, the transportation officials spoke in the most candid terms to date about what Assemblyman Jack Conners, D-Camden, labeled a "transportation boondoggle."
The cost of the line, originally placed at about $600 million, is now "around a billion dollars," said Rich Sarles, NJ Transit's assistant executive director.
And that does not include the $140 million in cost overruns that the contractor building the line has sued to obtain.
Warrington took charge of NJ Transit after the election of Gov. James E. McGreevey, a Democrat. He said he is particularly distraught that the state under his Republican predecessors bypassed the normal federal planning and funding process in selecting the Camden-to-Trenton route, forcing it to "use 100 percent state funding."
Aggravating matters, the state borrowed the funds because there was no money left in the Transportation Trust Fund to "pay as you go." The state floated a $450 million bond to pay for construction.
"The line will cost NJ Transit $48 million a year just in debt service for the next 17 years," Warrington said.
Because ridership is expected to be low, the line will cost an additional "$20 (million) to $25 million a year in operating subsidies," the transit executive predicted.
"The irony in all this is that the line is not a congestion reliever," Warrington said. "We're going to be paying this off for the next 17 years while basic mobility needs are not being satisfied."
"We continue to have extraordinary problems on Routes 55, 42 and 38."
Other transportation corridors more in need of relief were rejected because of political opposition. Warrington said his agency is now examining all the assumptions on which the line is based, including ridership projections.
"I'd be very surprised if the new projections don't come in lower" than the original projection of 9,000 fares a day, he said.
Both Warrington and state Transportation Commissioner Jamie Fox are expected to testify at Tuesday's hearing, a joint session of the Assembly Transportation Committee and the Assembly's Light Rail Advisory Panel.
Conners, a member of the light rail panel, said he hopes to get to the bottom of the process that led to the Camden- to-Trenton line in order to "make sure that the mistakes made in the conception and execution of this line are not made again."
"My main concern is that it won't have ridership," Conners said. "My understanding is that they may not charge people as an incentive to get people to ride it."
Asked about eliminating fares as a promotional tool, Martin Robins, director of the Transportation Policy Institute at Rutgers-New Brunswick, said, "Their imaginations should be as expansive as possible."
Robins, who studied the project, said that the opening of the South Jersey line "comes at a very bad time. NJ Transit is already laboring under a back-breaking financial deficit."
One option that is not on the table, transit officials emphasized, is scuttling or postponing the opening of the line.
"The one thing worse than spending that kind of money," Fox said, "is spending that kind of money and then not using it."
Troubled by the toppling of a bridge last year, project construction crews are now ripping up and rebuilding at least eight grade crossings from Palmyra to Riverside. The pitch between the rail bed and River Road was too steep at several crossings.
"We talked about this problem with NJ Transit four years ago," Burlington County Engineer Joe Caruso said.
Sarles estimated the cost of the corrections at "a few million dollars."
Howard Menaker, a spokesman for the consortium building the line, said the contractor and NJ Transit are negotiating the cost and the terms of the reconstruction.
Reach Richard Pearsall at (856) 486-2465 or rpearsall@courierpostonline.com