By BRIAN DONOHUE
Robert John Davis is a serious train dude.
Davis and his friends are restoring the last surviving diesel locomotive from the Lehigh & New England Railroad that once ran across northwestern New Jersey.
When the producers of the TV show “Young Sheldon” were filming an episode in which the main character is hired as a railroad museum guide, they hired Davis to ensure the script’s facts were accurate.
And every workday for years, the Middletown resident boarded the 7:45 am train in Red Bank and rode to his New York office in a cushy reclining seat inside a private car leased by the Jersey Shore Commuter Club, in which he served as vice president.
These days, Davis still commutes to New York City for work three times a week.
And given his expertise and experience with trains and NJ Transit, he knows there’s only one way to go: he drives his Ford Explorer.
When he was taking the train, he says, it seemed like one of two ancient bridges or the decrepit, Hurricane Sandy-damaged Hudson River Tunnel along the corridor to New York were constantly causing frustrating delays or cancellations.
“My joke to my wife was “which one of those three things would be the cause of delay today?” he said. “It really was a horrible piece of it.”
In ditching his train commute, Davis is far from alone.
Ridership from the Red Bank train station remains 65 percent below its peak weekday average of 1,906 in 2002, according to figures from NJ Transit.
While the number of people taking the train has inched up since bottoming out during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, the 2024 Fiscal Year figure of 661 daily riders remains far below the days when commuters jockeyed for coveted parking spaces in the six lots surrounding the station.
Experts, public officials and riders themselves cite a widespread change in work patterns behind the drop, including the rise of remote work, most notably during the pandemic and in the years since.
There’s also, of course, the massive levels of frustration with chronic delays caused by NJ Transit and Amtrak’s aging infrastructure, highlighted during multiple, cancellation-plagued “Summers of Hell” in recent years.
“The time schedules were all never true,’’ said Chris Hanigan of Red Bank, who commuted to New York five days a week before his job went remote during the pandemic. “They say it takes an hour and 15 but it always took an hour and a half sometimes two hours,” he said.
Hanigan last week resumed commuting to New York twice a week after his employer ordered workers back into the office part-time. As one of a range of options, including bus and ferry, it works well for him and he’s looking forward to returning.
Overall, he said, “I had relatively positive feelings about the commute.”
Amid the lagging ridership, Red Bank is poised to join the long list of towns where large-scale, dense, so-called Transit Oriented Development (TOD) has risen near its train station, with up to 400 apartments proposed for the NJ Transit-owned parking lots and other nearby properties. The Red Bank Planning board resumes its public hearing on the redevelopment plan Wednesday night at 7 pm at Borough Hall.
The uncertainties over present and future ridership pose questions over what is built, who will lives there, and what kind of place the new neighborhood at the town’s center eventually becomes.
In other words: does the promise of transit-oriented development hold true if people are shunning the transit part? Will it be a commuter village, as NJ Transit envisioned these places when it began its TOD initiatives two decades ago? Or a place for empty nest retirees downsizing from their McMansions?
Tim Evans, of the smart planning advocacy group New Jersey Future said NJ Transit’s push to redevelop its properties near transit hubs like Red Bank only underscores the need for the state to fix the agency’s longstanding funding woes. 
“Promoting Transit Oriented Development without a guarantee that the state will continue to adequately fund transit service amounts to false advertising,” he wrote in a blog post last March.
In an interview with redbankgreen, Evans said that with housing construction still lagging from the 2009 recession, the demand is so great – especially for housing in walkable neighborhoods – anything that’s built will quickly fill with residents either way.
Having a train that people are reluctant to ride, “is not as much of a deal breaker for TOD as you thought,” he said.
Such development is just more likely to attract people who simply enjoy living in a walkable neighborhood, rather than people looking for a short walk to the train for their daily commute.
“That was the mental model in the 90’s, was that people who wanted to live in TOD were people who commuted into the city every day,” he said. “There’s been a change in who’s moving into these things and why.”
“Even if they’re not riding the train they’re moving there because they like the walkability aspect of it,” he added.
In response to questions from redbankgreen about how ridership affects development plans, a spokesman for NJ Transit sent the following statement:
“NJ TRANSIT welcomes the prospect of the Train Station Redevelopment Plan taking shape, and looks forward to continued collaboration with the Borough, Denholtz, and our broader project partners in support of a reimagined Red Bank station area that the community will enjoy for years to come.”
That re-imagining seems to include either people not returning to the trains in huge numbers or, conversely, walking or biking there if they do.
The agency has requested just 150 commuter parking spaces in the proposed garages that would hold up to 900 cars, according to Susan Fovate, principal with BFJ Planning, which prepared the proposed train station redevelopment plan.
That would be down from about 480 spaces in the six existing commuter lots, which have remain noticeably empty on weekday mornings since ridership began its decline.
There is hope that federal construction projects will fix the bottlenecks that caused headaches for commuters like Robert John Davis and lure them back aboard. Construction continues on both a replacement for the decrepit century-old Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River and a new Hudson River rail tunnel.
Even if those are built before he retires, he doesn’t see himself going back on the train to get to his job in Lower Manhattan. Because as a student of rail history, he knows the past still looks far rosier than the future.
In true train-expert fashion, Davis recounted a list of options previous generations of Red Bank commuters available to them to reach Lower Manhattan where his office is located.
They could take direct trains to two spots in Jersey City – the current Exchange Place and the defunct Central Jersey rail terminal in what is now Liberty State Park (see historic LSP sign at right) where they could hop short ferry rides to Manhattan. There were also more direct trains to Hoboken, where they could also take a ferry. And the direct trains to Manhattan were, well, a little more direct and reliable. One of them even had a special car for his club.
“We’ve been losing options,” he said. “So much infrastructure is gone. It’s easy for us to focus on what’s left and what’s wrong, but when I look at the big picture, we’ve been going backwards for 60 years.”
redbankgreen editor Brian Donohue may be reached via email at [email protected] or by calling or texting 848-331-8331 or yelling his name loudly as he walks by. Do you value the news coverage provided by redbankgreen? Please become a financial supporter if you haven’t already. Click here to set your own level of monthly or annual contribution.
