Feb. 14 will mark the one year anniversary of New Jersey Transit’s Executive Director Kevin S. Corbett, who was picked by Gov. Phil Murphy to turn around the beleaguered agency.

On paper, Corbett, a top executive with AECOM, an international infrastructure company, had a solid track record for handling complex projects with many moving parts. Over the arc of his public service career he played key roles in the redevelopment of Times Square  and the post  9/11 revitalization of economic activity in Lower Manhattan.

As challenging as those past assignments were, turning around the nation’s third largest transit system has proved quite a challenge because the agency comes with so much baggage. During the eight years of Governor Chris Christie tenure the state’s transit system was used as a prop by the Governor, much like the GWB was used, to send a political message that had nothing to do with transportation. And to add insult to his injury, I never actually saw the Governor ride New Jersey Transit.

So, how is Mr. Corbett doing?

As a New Jersey commuter for forty years and a former employee of New Jersey Transit’s precursor, the Erie Lackawanna, I feel I can offer an informed opinion. That assessment is not just based on my decades tenure as a long suffering customer on the Morris & Essex line,  but on the fact that Corbett actually rides the train everyday from Morristown. So, I have been able to see him in action as a fully engaged chief executive.

I was listening while he was engaged in a coaching conversation with a train conductor after the conductor was speaking negatively about  train engineers who called out sick. What struck me was Corbett’s balanced tone. It was corrective, but respectful in a way that did not diminish the employee he was speaking with.

At 63, I know what moral leadership looks and sounds like and that was as close an approximation as New Jersey Transit has seen for awhile. Sadly, over the years its upper management has been a place to park partisan political operatives.   

As NorthJersey.com reported last year, nine of Christie’s operatives planted in New Jersey Transit enjoyed six-figure salaries that included an instance of a  $70,000 spike in salary even “as it hemorrhaged staff needed to operate safely and reliably.”

Of course, this Machiavellian stacking of a vital transportation agency with political hacks was exactly what the former Governor did with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Christie’s call to cancel the building of the ARC Tunnel under the Hudson River let the GOP presidential primary electorate know he was a fiscal conservative.  But in reality, it squandered hundreds of millions of dollars in engineering and land acquisition for a project that was well underway when Christie applied the brakes. 

For years, commuters have complained about the deterioration in service that came even as the fares continued to go up. That sub-par performance was aggravated by NJ Transit’s self-inflicted  wound in 2013 that came when managers failed to properly prepare for Sandy, leaving the agency’s fleet of locomotives and passenger coaches vulnerable to that storm surge it produced. $120 million in damage was done. 

Meanwhile, across the river, the MTA, faced with the same unprecedented severe weather, avoided a similar calamity thanks to climate change vulnerability studies it had previously developed with Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Observatory. 

And the legacy of Christie’s reign of misrule lingers to this day.

Back in December, Bloomberg News reported that nearly “a third of New Jersey Transit’s rush-hour trains to and from Manhattan arrived late in November” and that “overall timeliness for the trouble-plagued agency plunged to 82 percent, the lowest for a November since at least 2003 and down from 92 percent a year earlier.”

But with that pain has come some considerable gain in the form of the near completion of the system wide installation of positive train control (PTC),  an advanced automatic collision avoidance system that can stop a train before accidents occur. 

Back in September of 2016 the lack of that system was a contributing factor in the train crash that killed one person, injured over a hundred others and caused $6 million in damage to the Hoboken Terminal. The National Transportation Safety Board also concluded that the primary cause of the fatal crash was a fatigued NJ Transit engineer, suffering from undiagnosed sleep apnea, who lost consciousness as he approached the Hoboken terminal.

Before Corbett took over NJ Transit, the PTC was running way behind schedule and the price tag, at $320 million,  had more than doubled in price, When Governor Murphy took office in 2017  most of the installation was still incomplete.

“We’ve had to complete four years’ worth of work in less than one year and we are not finished,” Corbett told the NJ Transit Board, Bloomberg News reporter. “We’ll have to complete another four years’ worth of work over the next two years to have PTC fully operational by the federal mandated deadline of Dec. 31. 2020.” 

The kind of cronyism that took hold at NJ Transit under Christie is corrosive. When politics eclipses performance, it undermines how all the ‘un-connected’ employees feel about their job. Rather than it being about what you know, it becomes all about who you know.

By contrast, Corbett’s actual daily engagement with the workforce has already resulted in a morale boost. When polled, the NJ Transit employees I have encountered, who were not cleared to speak with the press, had words of praise for Mr. Corbett’s hands on style of leadership.

“Of course it makes a difference for us that he rides the train everyday,” said one NJ Transit veteran. “That’s where you lead, from the front.”