DeCamp Decamps

DeCamp Bus Lines, which started as a stagecoach company in 1870 ferrying people from western Essex County in New Jersey to Newark and later began running motorized buses to New York City, is ending commuter service to the city from Essex County.  The simple fact is that most people along its routes don't travel to New York City for work anymore, and there are fewer daytrippers using DeCamp to take in the city's numerous attractions.  The last day of service is Friday, April 7, 2023.  (DeCamp isn't going out of business; it will continue to run charter and shuttle buses as well as casino buses to Atlantic City.)

DeCamp suspended service five months into the pandemic due to lack of ridership, but it later resumed service aimed primarily at commuters.  This meant that buses stopped running after about 8:00 P.M.  That meant no return service to the suburbs for people who might want to go a Broadway show, take in a concert, attend a ballet recital, or do all of the other 499,997 things Huey Lewis once said you can do even at 2:45 A.M.  I began to wonder if the DeCamp family thought those of us in the Caldwells and nearby Verona - Montclair and Bloomfield, also affected, still have passenger rail service - were all Mormons who rolled up the sidewalks and went in when the sun went down.

But news of its end of service for Essex County is a total blow.  Now we can't even take the bus to go to a place like a museum, Central Park or the Statue of Liberty on a Saturday afternoon.  Result?  If you live in Essex County, New Jersey and you don't have passenger rail to fall back on - which the Caldwells and Verona haven't had since 1966 - you'll drive either into the city, to Weehawken and take the ferry across the Hudson River, or to Hoboken and take the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) train, and you'll like it, because it beats the alternative - taking the #29 city bus to the PATH station in Newark! 

Then again, even rail service to and from New York can be spotty, but with Montclair having six railway stations and the Caldwells and Verona having none, mediocre public transit is better than no public transit at all. 

I've pretty much given up on public transit in this country.  Sure, I'll still use it in New York when I finally go back there, but I obviously can no longer use it to get there from where I live, and just about every other place I go is by car.  (Don't bother me none; I have a Volkswagen!) I'm no longer campaigning for high-speed intercity rail because I concluded that there is no way it's ever going to happen.  Besides, where would I ride it? 

The U.S. House members who represent Essex County are currently trying to get grant money for continued bus service, or possible NJ Transit to take over the DeCamp routes.  Good luck with that; despite the pandemic being all but officially over, the days of the socioeconomic conditions that made commuter buses to Manhattan serving Essex County a viable business are also over. People would rather stay home with their families than go to the city and party until they get drunk.

Maybe the pandemic has made northern New Jersey suburbanites more like the Mormons.