Although I reside in the Philadelphia metro area, I frequently use the New Jersey Transit system to travel to New York City. When it works smoothly, the trip is quick, convenient and relatively inexpensive compared to Amtrak. However, NJTransit can be problematic during bad weather and is sometimes plagued with delays.

Bloomberg news website has created a “fun” visualization of train delays on the New Jersey Transit commuter rail service. In NJ Transit Is NYC’s Least Reliable Commuter Rail — By a Long Shot Bloomberg has mapped a series of smiley-face emojis onto a New Jersey Transit map. Happy, sweating, and sad emojis are used to represent trains that are on time, 10-30 minutes late, and more than 30 minutes late, respectively. The use of expressive smiley emojis on an animated transit map vividly illustrates the levels of delays on different lines during a particularly bad evening commute.

Bloomberg tracked more than 190,000 trains using real-time transit feed data from May through July 2025 to determine that NJ Transit passengers experienced major service disruptions at six times the rate of other commuters on its New York and Connecticut counterparts. The data revealed that there are frequent delays of 15 minutes or more, cancellations, and particularly long delays of 30 minutes or more on NJ Transit trains.