Good morning.  My name is Neile Weissman.  I’m here to propose that New Jersey Transit (“NJT”) run a pilot to extend limited weekend-holiday service to High Bridge and Hackettstown, and to move up the early outbound to Port Jervis, for the months of April to October as a means to grow cycle tourism across Hunterdon, Warren, Morris and Sussex counties.

Know that I’ve organized some two thousand group rides and weekends for the New York Cycle Club, many of which rely heavily on regional rails, including NJT’s excellent Bike Aboard Program.

Below are two examples of bike routes facilitated by NJT—a prerequisite if one is to attract  New York City’s 800,000 active adult cyclists—most of who don’t own cars.

The first is a 50 mile loop out of Annandale through Hunterdon County comprising the scenic, low-traffic country roads and mom-and-pop food stops that recreational cyclists crave.

Unfortunately, these routes can only be ridden weekdays because there is no weekend-holiday service to High Bridge or Hackettstown.  And outbound service to Port Jervis Line departs an hour later than weekdays—significantly reducing the distances cyclists can cover.

Fortunately, the incremental expense to provide that service appears reasonable relative to the annual revenue attributed to bicycle tourism across the four-counties.

$60,000 is the estimated labor cost for an engineer and two conductors to implement an April to October pilot.  Compare that to an estimated annual $76 to $190 million in spending ascribed to bike tourism. (See breakdown of both estimates below.)

This isn’t “If you build it, they will come.”  You’ve already got it.  It’s about providing the means for your customers to get there.  

And if the powers-that-be proceed with the pilot, I recommend discounting tickets on the High Bridge-Hackettstown spurs as further inducement.

“Cyclist’s Special,” British Rail, 1955

Addendum

1. Estimated Incremental Labor Cost of Proposed Weekend Schedule Changes

NJ Transit does not publish route-level marginal crew costs, and the true figure depends on union work-rule provisions (minimum-call guarantees, overtime triggers) that are not public. The estimate below is a transparent, bottom-up calculation — crew wage × added running time × service days — intended for order-of-magnitude use in testimony, not as a substitute for NJ Transit’s own costing.

Assumptions: 3-person crew (engineer + 2 conductors), loaded wage rate ≈ $186/hr, 61 days/yr (Apr–Oct Sat/Sun/Holiday, bike-ban days excluded).

Service days limited to April–October Saturdays and Sundays plus April–October holidays, excluding dates on which NJ Transit bans bicycles onboard (Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day) and the Saturday preceding Yom Kippur (Sept. 19, 2026), on the reasoning that a bike-oriented service addition has no rider benefit on a day riders cannot bring bicycles. 

Line (e) is the widest-uncertainty item: whether the added hour is paid at straight time or overtime depends on where it falls relative to the crew’s existing shift under the NJ Transit–union crew agreement, which is not public.

2. Estimated Current Annual Contribution of Bike Tourism, Four-County Region

No dedicated bike-tourism study exists for Hunterdon, Sussex, Morris and Warren counties specifically. The figures below are a bottom-up estimate: total county tourism spending, scaled to a current-year figure, multiplied by an assumed bike-tourism share of that total.

The 2%–5% bike-tourism share is an estimate, not a measured figure. It reflects that cycling is a proportionally larger share of a smaller, rural-recreation-oriented visitor economy in these four counties than it is statewide (where Atlantic City and the Jersey Shore dominate total visitor spending), informed by county tourism offices’ own characterization of cycling as a significant draw and by comparable rail-trail economic-impact studies elsewhere. A defensible figure for the record would require an intercept survey of trail and route users, as was done for the Empire State Trail and for Hunterdon County’s broader tourism economy.

Notes:

¹NJ Transit crew scheduling and overtime rules are governed by collective bargaining agreements with rail unions (e.g., BLET, SMART-TD) that are not published for public reference.

²Wage inputs, loaded at ≈60% for benefits/payroll-tax overhead (author’s estimate): Locomotive engineer, median ≈$45/hr in New Jersey — Glassdoor, “NJ TRANSIT Locomotive Engineer Salaries,” glassdoor.com/Salaries/NJ-TRANSIT-Locomotive-Engineer-Salaries-E19570_D_KO11,30.htm, accessed Sept. 2026. Conductor, average $24.37/hr — ZipRecruiter, “NJ Transit Conductor Salary,” ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Nj-Transit-Conductor-Salary, accessed Sept. 2026. Crew complement (engineer + 2 conductors) is the author’s assumption, not a confirmed NJ Transit consist.

³High Holy Day dates: Chabad.org, “Jewish Holidays in 2026,” chabad.org/holidays/default_cdo/year/2026/jewish/holidays-2026.htm.

⁴E.g., Hunterdon County Division of Economic Development & Tourism / GoHunterdon.org, “Bike Hunterdon” initiative pages, gohunterdon.org.

⁵Empire State Trail economic impact study, as reported in Chronogram, “Empire State Trail Generates $1.87 Billion Annually,” 2026, chronogram.com/general/empire-state-trail-economic-impact-study-hudson-valley; Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, “Active Transportation Transforms America,” 2019, railstotrails.org.

Neile Weissman, 2026