7thPosition

© 2008 Adam E. Moreira (CC-BY-SA)Mary and I are starting to think about moving out of our apartment and buying a house. Obviously this is a huge decision with many things to consider, so to narrow down our choices I wanted to compare potential towns on how it would affect my commute. Like many people in New Jersey, I take NJ Transit to and from Manhattan for work.

How long does it really take to get from each of New Jersey's suburban towns into the city? I searched the internets, but surprisingly didn't really find what I was looking for in one easy location. There are online schedules, but without crunching the numbers and comparing a bunch of different trains, you don't get a real sense of the travel times involved. So I decided to put together a spreadsheet to do just that..

The Spreadsheet

I created a spreadsheet (NJTransit_Commute_Times.xls) that compares many of the rail stations in central-north New Jersey (Map). I included only the Northeast Corridor (NEC), Raritan Valley (RVL), Morris and Essex (M&E), and Montclair-Boonton (MBNTN) lines (I might add other rail lines if people are interested, but these ones are most interesting to me for my house hunting). The spreadsheet compares typical commute times for each train station, both for AM and PM rush, and AM and PM off peak. I also included both times to both New York Penn Station and PATH World Trade Center, since I go to both places.

Note that I compiled all of this data manually, just from looking at the published New Jersey Transit schedules. Believe me, as a computer geek I got really excited about the idea of importing all the departure and arrival times into a database and writing a program to find the best and worst trains to take for each station. I had to restrain myself here and agree not to spend more than a few days on this project. It could absolutely grow into valuable full-service travel time calculator and Google Maps mashup. Perhaps someday..

Just to be clear, the goal of this project wasn't to find the absolute best or worst train to take, but instead to get a general idea of how long the commute times are for each town. This is something that would be very valuable for anyone moving to New Jersey and trying to decide where to live.

Peak Hours (7-9 AM TO NYC, 5-7 PM FROM NYC)

For these times, I actually looked at each station and tried to determine which train would get me into (or out of) the city the fastest. Yeah, I just compared each train one by one. It was a lot of work, especially because express trains don't make every stop. I tried my best to pick the best-case time for each station.

I set limits on the arrival and departure times that I would consider. There were a handful of cases where the actual fastest train (by a minute or two) would get you into work around 9:30AM, or require you to leave at 4:30PM. In these cases, I'd instead pick the next-fastest train that would have you coming and going at more normal times.

Off Peak Hours (local trains)

Also important, these times give you an idea of how long each trip is during off peak hours. It will happen sometimes -- you have an early dentist appointment, or you stay late for drinks with co-workers, or whatever. You want to know how long those local trains are really going to take. For each line, I picked a representative local train that makes all stops. Again, it might not be the absolute best or worst train, but it gives you a general idea.

Some Observations

I've been a rider on NJ Transit for the past 5 years. When you take a train regularly, you get to know all of its quirks - which trains are likely packed standing room only, which ones are frequently delayed. You learn that when you leave the city after a certain time, things get complicated. Sometimes you just have to kill time for an hour at the sad little bar in the Hoboken train station. It happens.

There are inefficiencies in the train system, which should be no surprise to anyone who actually takes NJ Transit regularly, but this project made a few of them very clear to me.

For example, stations past Denville are served by both the Morris and Essex and Montclair-Boonton lines. It turns out that if you live out that far, you're generally better off transferring to M&E trains instead of taking the MBNTN ones. You wouldn't know that from reading only the MBNTN schedule. But when you're already commuting 2 hours each way, what's an extra 15 minutes?

That said, I admit that I went a little crazy doing this project over the past few days. I started thinking to myself things like "Ok lets get these poor people home," when trying out the numbers for the PM rush.

Maybe that's not so crazy. I've come to believe that commuting is the one thing that most affects your work-life balance. If moving a town away can cut 6 minutes off your commute in each direction, you save one hour a week. This is one decision that I really don't want to get wrong.