About 15 North Jersey residents rode DeCamp Bus Lines’ Route 33G from Essex County, New Jersey to New York City for the last time on Friday.
And as the state’s longest-running bus service shuts down its commuter lines after more than 150 years in operation, riders said they’ll feel the loss.
“DeCamp was a personal touch to the community,” said Weldon Ross, a DeCamp driver on his last morning rush-hour trip. He’s been driving from Montclair to Midtown for the last 13 years. “This community [will] know the difference right away … because it was such a natural thing.”
The Montclair-based, family-owned bus company had long been a fixture in North Jersey communities. It was founded as a covered wagon service in the 1870s and continued as a locally owned alternative to NJ Transit bus and train services until this year. But last month, DeCamp announced it could no longer afford to run its 80 daily trips in and out of New York.
Min Pied, a Wall Street banker, has been riding DeCamp lines for nearly a decade. NJ Transit plans to step in with “emergency” bus routes for DeCamp riders starting Monday – so, Pied said, she’s not worried about her own commute. But she’s concerned about bus drivers who could be out of work indefinitely.
“I think the real victims here are the DeCamp union workers,” Pied said. “My heart really goes out to them.” She said she hopes that other private bus companies “learn a great lesson from the history of DeCamp.”
Ross said he’ll still have a job. DeCamp will continue its charter bus services, including a line to the Wind Creek Casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and he expects to stay with the company.
But he’d been out of work when DeCamp shut down services entirely in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company resumed some service in 2021, after it was bolstered by aid, including $3 million through the federal Coronavirus Economic Relief for Transportation Services program.
But still, Ross said, the company faced dismal ridership when buses came back.
Min Pied, a banker on Wall Street, has been riding DeCamp lines for nearly a decade. She worries bus drivers with DeCamp will be put out of work as the company shuts down NYC commutes.
In August 2020, the company's vice president, Jonathan DeCamp, told the New York Times that ridership had fallen from a pre-pandemic average of 6,500 daily passengers to fewer than 400. He later told Gothamist that when the company announced the end of NYC service, ridership had only rebounded to about 1,300 people a day.
“A lot of people start working from home, you know?” Ross said. “We took major hits on Fridays.”
Tim Witzig, an architect originally from St. Louis, Missouri, started riding DeCamp buses when he moved to New Jersey in the 1970s, at the age of 13.
“A lot of times you have memories about going to see a show, or going to Broadway, or going to a museum,” he said aboard the bus on Friday. “And all those things happened for me on this bus.”
He said he was overwhelmed with nostalgia during his final DeCamp bus ride into New York. But he said he’s pleased with how NJ Transit has handled the fallout.
NJ Transit this week announced details of several lines aimed at riders of DeCamp’s Routes 66, 33 and 44. It said the new lines would serve about 85% of current weekly DeCamp customers, and that others could be served by other existing transit services. The NJ Transit routes will generally be cheaper than the DeCamp lines they replace.
It isn’t yet clear, though, if those new lines will remain in place indefinitely. NJ Transit said it would monitor ridership, and “will be able to make adjustments in June if warranted and as resources allow.”
Emaya Patterson, a Kansas native living in the Bloomfield area, rode the bus on her way to her job as a receptionist at a law firm.
“I know this [bus] has been around since the Dark Ages, so I bet a lot of people are shaken up about it,” Patterson said.
Jonathan DeCamp has not yet returned a call seeking comment that was placed on Wednesday.
