Sarah Blustain arrived at the Hoboken Terminal at eight-forty-seven this morning, just two minutes after New Jersey Transit train 1614 on the Pascack Valley Line jumped a rail bumper and crashed through the terminal wall. The ceiling of the terminal had already collapsed. “I saw one woman who was seriously injured,” Blustain said, along with many people with more minor injuries. Within the hour, officials would report that one person was killed and more than a hundred were injured. The incident came just eleven days after pipe bombs were found at a transit station in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and people at Hoboken Terminal were openly wondering whether the train crash was the result of terrorism. One man “said he heard an explosion and started running,” Blustain said. But soon Governor Chris Christie assured a worried public that there was no evidence this was anything other than a rail accident.

One reason authorities were able to come to this conclusion so quickly may be that New Jersey Transit has been struggling with safety concerns for years. A large rail yard abuts the terminal, and on Thursday morning its gates were open and unmanned. Looking for someone to interview, I entered the main office building at the yard. On a staff bulletin board, there was a posting, dated February, 2016, from the New Jersey Transit Office of System Safety. Under the heading “ALERT: Yard Derailments/Incidents,” it listed ten rail-yard safety violations that had occurred during the previous two months. These included five derailments, one near-miss between a train and an employee, and two collisions “where a train struck a rolled up door.” The alert pointed out that a similar warning of safety violations had been issued in November of 2015. “These serious incidents reflect a dangerous trend,” the posting warned. “The main cause of most of these incidents appears to be a temporary lapse of situational awareness, poor or lack of communication, failure to follow proper procedures, or human error.” The alert did not provide any system-wide remedy to these serious safety incidents. Instead, it asked employees to routinely conduct safety briefings, “to communicate with each other . . . and discuss the precautions that need to be taken.” It also reminded employees to “Review all Safety and Operating Rules.”

Federal and state inspectors will spend days, perhaps weeks, examining the wreckage before they are able to announce a cause of the crash. One culprit that seems likely, though, is the particularly nasty politics of New Jersey, and of Christie’s decision to block the legislature’s efforts to fund transportation projects. The story goes back at least to 2013. That was a terrible year for New Jersey Transit. The agency reported twenty injuries in several incidents, including a collision, a derailment, and a train striking a vehicle. The following year, the transit authority announced a series of efforts to make the system safer. It established an internal seventeen-member safety commission and hired a German train-safety engineering firm, Rail Safety Consulting, to conduct a review of the system. At a public hearing, New Jersey's state transportation commissioner, Jim Simpson, said that the most important part of the safety plan was hiring a new executive director of New Jersey Transit. "Safety starts at the top, or it doesn't start," Simpson said. "You’ve got a new sheriff in town, Veronique (Ronnie) Hakim, who’s totally committed to safety.” The next year, Hakim left New Jersey Transit to return to the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority. A year later, New Jersey Transit has yet to name a permanent director. (New Jersey Transit officials did not respond to several calls and an e-mail request for comment.)

The safety record has, arguably, only gotten worse since the lousy year of 2013. According to Federal Railroad Administration data, instances of New Jersey Transit derailments, collisions, and other safety incidents have gone up, though injuries did fall, in 2014 and 2015. The February safety alert about a “dangerous trend” suggests that 2016 will not be much better.

In June of this year, Christie suspended nearly all transportation-capital projects in the state. The board of New Jersey Transit then stopped its monthly public meetings. This was the culmination of a long-simmering battle. Christie had insisted that he would not fund the state’s Transportation Trust Fund, which pays for major capital improvements and has been used for upkeep and maintenance, unless Democrats in the state legislature agreed to lower sales and estate taxes. They refused, and the fund went bankrupt. Earlier this week, Martin Robins, who founded the Voorhees Transportation Center, at Rutgers University, issued a warning about the lack of spending on essential maintenance and safety enhancements. "Maybe nothing catastrophic has happened, but maintenance cannot be deferred," he said. "It's absolutely wrong, when you're operating something as potentially dangerous as a rail system."