Camden County provides residents more public transportation options than elsewhere in South Jersey, but riders want more reliability, better coordination, and expanded bus and rail service to the less-populated southeastern part of the county.
Those are among the top takeaways from a recent Rutgers University-Camden deep dive into riders’ priorities and recommendations for improving the system.
“People aren’t asking for the transportation system to be stripped away and rebuilt,“ said Kristin Curtis, associate director of research at the university’s Senator Walter Rand Institute for Public Affairs.
“They’re really asking for it to just be enhanced and fine-tuned to help better suit their needs,” Curtis said.
Findings are based on the responses of more than 300 people who completed a survey or participated in hour-long focus groups with institute researchers.
A chunk of Camden County is connected to Philadelphia by the PATCO Speedline rail service. NJ Transit bus routes carry commuters into the city and within the county, with some routes serving areas of Gloucester and Cumberland Counties.
They connect at the Walter Reed Transportation Center in downtown Camden, but participants said the schedules of the various services were not synced well, sometimes resulting in long waits when transferring.
About one-third of riders surveyed want expanded train or bus service between 6 and 9 a.m., with about 25% calling for overnight bus routes to accommodate shift work.
One focus-group participant, for instance, said that he gets off work at 2 a.m. “So I’m sitting out there waiting for three or four hours for a bus.”
Dozens of industrial parks and warehouses have sprung up in Swedesboro, Millville, and other towns that draw many workers from Camden County, Curtis said.
Most transit agencies are grappling with how to adapt fixed-route bus schedules to the off-peak hours of workers in manufacturing and logistics.
The study, funded by the New Jersey Policy Lab at Rutgers-New Brunswick, was released in late January.
Research conducted by the Walter Rand Institute in 2019 found that 23% of Camden County residents reported they had no public transportation options in their communities.
Study participants, for instance, voiced strong support for expanding the PATCO line to places east of Lindenwold, the last eastern station. Many also wanted PATCO to be extended to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia for easier access to Amtrak.
Money is tight and big infrastructure project costs are astronomical, but many of the recommendations from residents were relatively simple, including better information from transit agencies: having stops announced beforehand and access to real-time information on schedule delays, particularly on NJ Transit’s buses and River Line.
“One of the things that folks recognize is that delays happen,” Curtis said. “There might be an accident somewhere … having the information to know when the bus would be coming, just so they can make sure that they’re planning correctly, would be really helpful.”
