America’s third-largest commuter rail service, New Jersey Transit, is grinding to a halt as engineers go on strike. It’s the latest inconvenience for the region’s straphangers, suffering from local governments intent on forcing them into expensive, impractical, or non-existent mass transit.

Members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen walked off the job on Friday. The chief executive of NJ Transit, Kris Kolluri, told the press on Tuesday that the engineers seek a $35,000 raise, bringing their average salary to $225,000.

The union disputed the number and argued that they haven’t had a raise in six years. The strike impacts 350,000 riders trying to get to work, medical appointments, or Jersey Shore vacations — lives put on hold by the very people supposed to serve the public.

Adding to suburbia’s discombobulation is that driving is being made more challenging. The political class is determined to punish all those commuters “packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes” — as the Police called them in their 1983 hit, “Synchronicity II” — until they give up their cars.

Yet many areas aren’t served by mass transit. The executive of Rockland County, New York, Edward Day, told The New York Sun in June 2023 that his residents live in “a transit desert that forces more than 60 percent … to drive into the city because they have no other way to get there.”

There are deserts on train schedules, too. The Pascack Valley Line has just one track and can’t run in both directions at once, like a subway. In 2019, after the morning train “failed to show up” about twice a month, the New York Times declared the North Jersey Coast Line to be “the very worst commuter train in America.”

Herding commuters into current mass transit is putting the cart before the horse — and the rickety, smelly old nag only goes when and where it wants. Despite these realities, commuters are forced to pay more each year for slow, inefficient transportation to work. 

In January, the Garden State Parkway, New Jersey Turnpike, and all bridges and tunnels into Manhattan raised their tolls. NJ Transit hiked fares 15 percent in July with three percent annual increases to follow. Commuters — many who’ve gone years without raises, too — had no option to strike in protest.

On top of the cost, mass transit is crumbling. It’s more than a century old in places, yet Gilded Age New Jersey had more options than today. Across the state, train tracks lay abandoned and independent bus lines have disappeared, because governments decided they could do the job better than the private sector. 

Promises to build flashy, modern transit options seem never to materialize. The Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, started in 1980, doesn’t yet serve Bergen County. The cars on its truncated route glide along empty — ghost trains in a region hungry for modern ways to travel. 

Delays, cancellations, and lack of space are other negatives. For a month in February, the Hoboken PATH station, a gateway from New Jersey to Lower Manhattan since 1908, closed for repairs. The buses provided only stretched commutes that already average the longest in America. 

Last year’s introduction of congestion pricing in Manhattan presented a new burden. On top of that, Governor Hochul, the New York Democrat, said last month that the state will add more speed cameras in construction zones at key thoroughfares. 

In 1908, Henry Ford debuted his Model T for the workingman and Americans embraced the independence that cars offered. Yet affordable, safe, clean, and reliable mass transit would find riders eager to climb aboard.

NJ Transit’s engineers play a key role in getting those commuters where they need to go. Yet meeting their demands won’t advance a future with fewer cars — and the only innovation even suggested this year has been by “Googly Eyes NJ,” which urges adding the adornments to make trains more appealing.

To deliver the mass-transit utopia dreamed of by Mrs. Hochul and others in government, systems need to modernize and expand. Until they do, commuters will have to suffer and pay however they travel — “lemmings,” as The Police describes them, “in a suicidal race.”