From NJ.com
Conductors assaulted on trains.
Employee facilities that are filthy and infested with rodents.
A culture where “an on-time train is better than a safe train.”
An NJ Transit union official said Tuesday there is no culture of safety at the statewide transportation agency.
“We just go about our work every day and we’re not told anything — nobody ever talks to us about safety,” Michael J. Reilly, general chairman with the United Transportation Union, said during the monthly NJ Transit board meeting in Newark.
To illustrate his point, he referred to a monthly director’s report.
“There are 14 pages dedicated to on-time performance measures for rail, bus and light rail,” Reilly said. “On that same report, there are zero pages dedicated to safety.”
He said phones are out of date, some crew members have no radios to communicate with passengers in the event of a train delay or accident and employee morale is low after working nearly three years without a new contract.
State Transportation Commissioner Jim Simpson assured Reilly that safety is a priority for him and for newly hired NJ Transit Executive Director Ronnie Hakim.
“Safety starts at the top or it doesn’t start, and I can tell you that I’m committed to safety,” Simpson said. “And you’ve got a new sheriff in town, Ronnie Hakim, who’s totally committed to safety.”
“We would like to know how many employees are getting hurt — slips, trips and falls — (and) how many customers are getting hurt, and obviously there no room for any employees to be assaulted by a customer or anybody else,” Simpson said.
“We have a lot of trains and we have a lot of bad areas,” Reilly replied. “We need cameras in those areas, but we’ve had a number of conductors assaulted.”
He also cited reports from union members about poor conditions at a facility in Manhattan where NJ Transit workers can rest between shifts.
Simpson opened up the lines of communication and urged Reilly and the union to alert him when they see safety lapses.
After the board meeting, Hakim was asked by reporters whether on-time performance has trumped safety.
“I don’t have any indication that it has,” she said.
The extended discussion on safety came during a meeting in which NJ Transit voted to hire Rail Safety Consulting of Pittsford, N.Y., for $468,000 to review its “rail inspection and maintenance procedures, work practices and overall safety culture.”
NJ Transit also has kicked off an internal committee of 17 employees to review rail safety. The review was in part spurred by a Federal Railroad Administration “deep dive” report of the deadly Metro-North Railroad accident along the Hudson River in New York on Dec. 1.
“We are doing a comparison as to how NJ transit fares, so if the FRA were to come in today and do a deep dive here, what would they find?” Hakim said.
She said the rail safety consultant will go beyond what the in-house committee is doing and use its national connections to come up with rail safety best practices.
