NJ Transit Delays Pile Up as African Union Pushes for Global Map Reform
A summer of commuter chaos in New Jersey collides with a movement in Africa to redraw the world map for accuracy and pride.
August 20 EST: If you ride NJ Transit, you don’t need charts to tell you the trains are a mess. You live it standing shoulder to shoulder in a stalled car, watching another evening melt away. Still, when Bloomberg dropped its deep-dive into summer rail performance, the numbers landed like confirmation of a bad hunch. Yes, it really is that much worse here.
Bad Odds, All Summer Long
Between May and July, about one in every 18 NJ Transit trains either limped in more than 15 minutes late or disappeared off the schedule. For the average rider, that means one commute wrecked every two weeks, like clockwork. If you live on Long Island or north of the city, you get that kind of disruption once every few months.
And some nights were brutal. On June 23, riders were whiplashed by a perfect storm a downed Amtrak signal, a brushfire, and some plain old equipment failures. Only half the trains heading north ran anywhere near on time. The Morris & Essex and Gladstone lines were practically shredded more than half the trains never made it or showed up hours late. At Penn Station, nine departures were simply erased from the board in a span of four hours.
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New Jersey’s Numbers Don’t Match Riders’ Reality
Over the summer as a whole, Bloomberg tracked over 1,000 NJ Transit trains that dragged in more than 30 minutes late. Metro-North and the LIRR? Closer to 300. Their monthly on-time rates sit north of 96 percent. New Jerseyans would kill for that.
Part of the reason the gap looks smaller on paper NJ Transit’s math. The agency lumps together any delay longer than six minutes. So whether your train is seven minutes late or an hour and seven minutes late, it’s just one tally mark in the same bucket. On top of that, NJ Transit publishes an “Amtrak-adjusted” on-time rate essentially, removing every problem it says isn’t its fault. With that accounting trick, its summer score jumps to 91 percent.
When Bloomberg pressed the agency, a spokesperson said the live data feed “isn’t 100 percent accurate.” That may be true. But across the river, Metro-North and the LIRR give the public a searchable history of every single delay and cancellation going back more than a decade, down to the minute and the cause. Riders in New Jersey don’t get that window.
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The Daily Wear and Tear
Numbers don’t show what happens to people trying to get home. The babysitter waiting an extra hour. The kid’s baseball game missed. The dinners tossed back into the fridge. For commuters, the unpredictability is exhausting, and it chips away at whatever faith is left in the system.
Part of the problem is structural. NJ Transit leans on Amtrak’s old infrastructure, much of it decades overdue for upgrades. When the signals fail or when weather turns ugly there’s no cushion. A small breakdown in one spot ripples into hours of backups.
The hard truth there’s no clear fix on the horizon. Riders have learned to pack patience and a Plan B.
Africa Redraws Its Place in the World
Meanwhile, a very different fight over accuracy is playing out thousands of miles away. This one’s not about train schedules but maps and it has just as much to do with how people see themselves.
Earlier this month, the African Union endorsed the “Correct The Map” campaign, pushing schools across the continent to dump the centuries-old Mercator projection in favor of the newer Equal Earth map.
The Mercator was built for 16th-century sailors. It works for navigation but warps reality Africa shrinks, while Europe and North America balloon. Generations of kids grew up looking at a map that quietly suggested their continent didn’t measure up.
“The World’s Longest Misinformation Campaign”
“The current size of the map of Africa is wrong. This is the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign,” said Moky Makura, who runs the advocacy group Africa No Filter.
The Equal Earth projection, introduced in 2018, fixes the scale without making the map unrecognizable. Selma Malika Haddadi, deputy chair of the AU Commission, says it’s about undoing the sense of marginality that Mercator has baked into classrooms for centuries.
The World Bank has already shifted its graphics away from Mercator. The UN is reviewing a petition to follow suit. And CARICOM, the Caribbean’s political bloc, has lined up in support, framing the change as part of a broader push against colonial-era defaults.
Why the Map Matters
For African kids, it’s more than a design choice. Teachers say putting a truer version of Africa on the wall builds confidence and identity. The symbolism matters too a continent reclaiming the way it’s seen in the world.
It’s a small but potent reform, and one the AU plans to push until Equal Earth becomes the classroom standard across member states.
The Common Thread
On the surface, New Jersey’s delayed trains and Africa’s redrawn maps live in different universes. But both stories are about truth-telling or the lack of it. Commuters want a transit agency that admits just how unreliable it is. African leaders want a world map that doesn’t shrink their continent to the margins.
In both cases, the ask is simple show things as they are, not how institutions wish them to look. People notice the difference. They always do.
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Trained in war zones, raised in Newark, and seasoned in city hall, Jordan blends grit reporting with deep integrity. From floods to finance bills, they’re always first on scene and last to leave.
