From the Courier News:
Is a transit village coming to your town?
NJ TRANSIT began the Transit-Friendly Communities for New Jersey program in 1999 with a Federal Highway Administration grant of $535,000, with additional funding from NJ TRANSIT and the sate Department of Community Affairs.
The program began with an initiative to revitalize the downtown areas of Bayonne, Hackensack, Hillsdale, Hoboken, Matawan, Palmyra, Plainfield, Red Bank, Riverton, Rutherford and Trenton.
In the months and years that followed, municipalities lined up to take advantage of the funding and services associated with designation. Now, there are 17 officially designated transit villages in New Jersey: Pleasantville (1999), Morristown (1999), Rutherford (1999), South Amboy (1999), South Orange (1999), Riverside (2001), Rahway (2002), Metuchen (2003), Belmar (2003), Bloomfield (2003), Bound Brook (2003), Collingswood (2003), Cranford (2003) Matawan (2003), New Brunswick (2005), Journal Square/Jersey City (2005) and Netcong (2005).
About 60 municipalities have applied in the past five years, and transit villages are chosen on the basis of individual merit, DOT spokesman Timothy Greeley said.
In the past 20 years, NJ TRANSIT has invested more than $8.2 billion to repair, rehabilitate and expand the state’s passenger rail lines, many of which were more than a century old.