Methodology

Our estimates are based on ridership estimates obtained through an OPRA request that someone kindly posted to reddit. We ballpark peak ridership on key lines as around 800–1000 (NEC) and 500 (M&E, MoBo). “Cost” of lost time is based on Department of Transportation estimates of the value of time spent in transit and prevailing New Jersey hourly rates, which we assume are higher for commuters than the average resident. Alerts are scraped from Bluesky pages that repost regular NJT delay alerts. We deduplicate to avoid counting the same delay twice, taking the highest reported delay. We are constantly improving our methodology and welcome feedback. The raw boarding data from that OPRA request is available to download here.