The effects of New Jersey Transit’s rail strike rippled across the region on Friday, disrupting travel plans for tens of thousands of commuters, hurting businesses that depend on riders’ spending and creating an opening for at least one company hoping to capitalize on the chaos.
With trains at a standstill after locomotive engineers walked off the job, the consequences for businesses like the Trackside Jo Cafe at Hoboken Terminal were clear immediately.
“The station is completely dead,” said the owner, Daisy McKeon, who sent some employees home early. “We can get through the weekend, but anything more than that makes me very nervous.”
The economic fallout from New Jersey’s first statewide rail strike in more than 40 years will largely depend on how long the agency’s trains, which carry about 70,000 people to jobs in New York City every workday, remain idle.
According to an analysis by the Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group. every hour that all New Jersey Transit train commuters are late getting to work in the city could cost employers about $6 million in lost productivity,
About half those commuters work in high-paying industries like finance and information technology, the group said.
For the private carrier Boxcar, the strike could be a boon. The company spent months preparing for a possible strike and saw it as a chance to expand. The owner, Joe Colangelo, bought the website strikeclock.com, which featured a countdown clock to the strike deadline, as well as advertisements for the company’s bus service.
Mr. Colangelo ordered additional buses before the strike so that Boxcar would have 9,000 seats for commuters, up from 6,000 before the stoppage began. Some round-trip tickets between New Jersey and New York City on Boxcar, which bills itself as a premium service, are nearly $50. A round-trip ticket for a comparable ride on a New Jersey Transit bus would be about $20.
“If there is a 34-day strike,” Mr. Colangelo said, referring to the length of the last strike, in 1983, “nobody would ever need to read about what Boxcar does because we would be serving all over New Jersey.”
Since then, many people, including many New Jersey Transit rail passengers, have gained the ability to work remotely. Many companies embraced hybrid work arrangements during the pandemic, letting employees split the workweek between office and home.
Friday is the least popular day for in-person work, and Gov. Philip D. Murphy said the transit agency was fortunate the strike had not started on a busier day.
“The workers who depend on NJ Transit are the backbone of our entire economy,” Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, said at a news conference on Friday.
Still, the disruption, even for a day, cut into some commuters’ wallets as they were forced to find other ways of getting to work.
On Friday morning, some people who normally ride NJ Transit to work, had to use Amtrak. But it came at a steep price.
Chris Smith, 54, is an executive chef for Flik Hospitality in Midtown Manhattan. He normally takes a New Jersey Transit train from Hamilton but rushed to Trenton on Friday to make the 6:21 a.m. Amtrak train. He paid $79 for a ticket. He pays about $20 for his usual one-way ticket on NJ Transit.
“I may have to get a hotel room tonight and maybe all of next week,” he said. “Not everyone can work remote.”
In the weeks leading up to the strike deadline, the transit agency encouraged riders who could do so to prepare to work at home. Nearly 60 percent of rail passengers have hybrid schedules, according to a New Jersey Transit survey of passengers a year ago.
Companies that have called workers back to the office five days a week, including Goldman Sachs, said they had been preparing for a potential transit strike and discussing expectations for their employees, including allowing some to work remotely.
Citigroup, one of the largest employers in New York City, said it had allowed employees whose jobs can be performed remotely to work outside the office because of the strike. (Most Citigroup employees have hybrid arrangements.)
Businesses outside the city were still trying to measure the strike’s potential impact. Saturday and Sunday are popular days for real estate agents to hold open houses in New Jersey, with higher demand for homes near train stations.
James Hughes, an agent in Montclair, N.J., said he did not think the strike would have an immediate impact on business. Most potential buyers arrive at open houses on weekends by car, he said, and the strike would have to last a long time before it affected where buyers wanted to live.
Many New Jersey Transit rail stations are in the heart of suburban towns and surrounded by restaurants that serve commuters, and there are coffee shops in some major stations, including Pennsylvania Station in Newark. There are also many restaurants in Penn Station in Manhattan, the New York terminus for New Jersey Transit trains.
Morning commuters have provided a steady stream of business for Cait and Abby’s Bakery in South Orange, N.J., since it opened 27 years ago, Raul Saade, the owner, said. The bakery, next to the South Orange station, opens at 6:30 a.m. to serve passengers traveling to New York.
There are fewer commuters now than before the pandemic, but on the average day Cait and Abby’s still serves about 100 people coffee and, in many cases, a pastry before they board their train, an important portion of the bakery’s business, Mr. Saade said.
“If it goes on for the whole week,” he said of the strike, “we are going to suffer.”
Mark Bonamo and Tammy LaGorce contributed reporting from New Jersey.
Matthew Haag writes for The Times about the intersection of real estate and politics in the New York region. He has been a journalist for two decades.
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