Fast Chargers Populate NJ Toll Roads
By Bill Beren • Beren1@verizon.net
With almost all the service areas on New Jersey’s toll roads now under management of Applegreen, all but five of the 22 service areas on the NJ Turnpike, Garden State Parkway, and Atlantic City Expressway now have Level 3 fast chargers for electric vehicle passenger vehicles. The exceptions are the Parkway stops Bruce Willis (mile 18), Frank Sinatra (mile 42), Celia Cruz (mile 76), Jon Bon Jovi (mile 124) and, on the Turnpike, Thomas Edison (mile 92, southbound).
The chargers on the Parkway and Turnpike are all Applegreen-branded fast chargers, which means drivers will have to download yet another app to power up, but at least fast chargers are available. The Frank Farley Service Area on the Atlantic City Expressway has 16 Level 3 fast chargers: eight EvGo and eight Tesla-branded chargers.
Applegreen expects that chargers will be installed at Frank Sinatra, Celia Cruz, Jon Bon Jovi, and Thomas Edison by the end of the year. Since Applegreen does not have the franchise for the Bruce Willis service area, they have no plans for installation of fast chargers there.
NJ Transit Less Reliable
Riders continue to give NJ Transit poor marks, reflecting frequent service delays and cancellations on both rail and bus routes.
A clue as to why riders view NJ Transit so poorly is found within the monthly reports given to the NJ Transit Board of Directors’ Operations and Customer Service Committee.
The standard metric used by transportation agencies is called “mean distance between failure,” or MDBF. Expressed in miles travelled, it states, as the name implies, how many miles a bus or rail car travels on average before it is taken out of service for repairs. Clearly, the higher the MDBF, the more reliable the bus or train service will be.
Unfortunately, the BDBF numbers for New Jersey are very low. From a pre-Covid peak of 85,000 miles in 2017, the rail system MDBF average fell to slightly above 45,000 miles as of the end of May 2026, the most recent month for which data were published, as of this writing.
Not surprisingly, of the 231 train trips cancelled in May, 51% were caused by mechanical breakdown, another 5% were the result of rail cars and locomotives not being available, and an additional 8% were due to crew absenteeism.
In contrast, in 2024, Metro-North Railroad, which serves New York, Connecticut, and a small part of New Jersey, reported an MDBF of 336,000 miles, and LIRR trains were reporting an MDBF of 193,000 miles.
Reliability of bus service is also affected by poor maintenance of NJ Transit’s bus fleet. According to data from NJ Transit, bus MDBF hovered around 15,000 in 2017, but because of increased equipment failures the MBDF dipped to a low of 4,600 in August 2025 before improving somewhat to 7,000 this past May. Although it would be important to know, NJ Transit does not report on the number of bus trips cancelled. This means the full impact of poor vehicle maintenance on service levels cannot be determined.
During these declines, New Jersey Transit has not announced any program to halt the degradation of vehicle reliability. Their answer when the question is raised at public meetings is that the fleet is old and parts for the vehicles are hard to purchase. Reliability will improve, they say, once new rail cars and buses are placed in service.
NJ Transit owns slightly over 3,000 buses. The agency was funded to buy 286 new buses in 2025 and 750 new buses in 2023. In addition, they began rebuilding 200 buses in 2022. As for the remaining 1,750, or so, it’s unclear what condition they are in.
NJ Transit has ordered 374 new rail cars over the past five years, but that represents just 33% of the fleet. The condition of the remainder is unclear.
NJ Transit riders will continue to see poor service as long as the agency continues to rely on obsolete and poorly maintained rail cars and buses.
In a telling article in the Bergen Record, transportation reporter Colleen Wilson wrote that in order to prevent disruptions of NJ Transit services during the World Cup, the agency “budgeted more than $12.7 million to purchase in advance the train parts that break down frequently, such as air conditioning units.”
Why isn’t this done for regular commuter service, and why haven’t they instituted a more robust preventive maintenance program? It doesn’t bode well for maintaining all the new equipment they are purchasing.
In Memorium: Greg Tufaro
I was deeply saddened to learn of the untimely passing of Greg Tufaro at the age of 59 on Aug 10 of unreported causes. Greg was Sen. P. Diegnan’s (D-LD 18) chief of staff. He and I worked closely together as we drafted the bill that authorized the NJ Electric School Bus Program, which set aside $45 million to fund electric school bus grants across the state. Greg worked tirelessly to make sure that whatever we felt was important was included in the final legislation. His support was crucial to the bill’s final passage in June of 2022.
I last spoke with Greg in the middle of July, when we discussed the need to draft new legislation to continue funding the grant program beyond this year, an effort we will continue to pursue with Sen. Diegnan and his staff.
Prior to serving as chief of staff to Sen. Diegnan, Greg was an award-winning reporter for the Home News Tribune, covering high school and college sports in Central Jersey. His front-page obituary appeared in the August 13 edition of the Star-Ledger.