Cumberland County

Cumberland County

Jonathan Erlichman and Kexing Christina Ren

Cumberland County is located near the Delaware Bay and is approximately 2 hours away from New York City and 45 minutes or so away from Philadelphia and Atlantic City. It was founded in 1748 and has total area of 677 square miles with 489 square miles of land. According to the 2007 estimates from the census bureau, over 155,000 (146,438 from the 2000 census) people reside in the three cities, ten townships and one borough of Cumberland County. Cumberland was named after Prince William, the Duke of Cumberland and is adjacent to Gloucester County, Atlantic County, Cape May County, Kent County and Salem County.

Demographics

The population density of Cumberland, according to the 2000 census was 299 people per square mile with an average density of 108 housing units per square mile. This means that the county is one of the larger counties in the state with one of the lowest populations. Most of the inhabitants reside within one of the three cities (Bridgeton, Vineland and Millville).

Age Breakdown

Demographic Total # of Residents % of Population

< 18 37,195 25.4%

18 - 24 12,447 8.5

25 - 44 45,689 31.2

45 - 64 32,070 21.9

> 65 19,037 13.0

Cumberland County

Table 1: Age Breakdown

Population Density Map (from 2000 Census Data)

Municipalities of Cumberland County

Cumberland County

Number Municipality Population Square MI1 Vineland City 56,271 68.7

2 Millville City 26,847 42.4

3 Bridgeton City 22,771 6.2

4 Shiloh Borough 534 1.2

5 Stow Creek Township 1,429 18.4

6 Greenwich Township 847 18.2

7 Hopewell Township 4,434 29.9

8 Upper Deerfield Township 7,556 31.1

9 Deerfield Township 2,927 16.8

10 Fairfield Township 6,283 52.3

11 Lawrence Township 2,721 37.5

12 Downe Township 1,631 50.8

13 Commercial Township 5,259 32.5

14 Maurice River Township 6,928 93.4

Table 2: Summary of Cumberland (Data as of April 1st, 2000)

Cumberland County

Economy Summary

According to the 2000 census data, Cumberland has a per capita income of $17,376 and a median household income level of $39,170 whereas the state of New Jersey had a per capita income level of $27,006 and a median household income level of $70,3471, suggesting that Cumberland is perhaps one of the poorer counties in New Jersey.

The majority of the residents of Cumberland are involved in the farming industry, although in the three cities of the county residents are employed in other areas ranging from mining, manufacturing and construction industries to business services, education and health services as well as the hospitality industry.

Education Summary

There are 37 elementary schools in the county, 7 high schools and according to information from the Cumberland County Public School System, there were over 26,000 students enrolled in 2004. In the county there is one institution of higher education, and that is the Cumberland County Community College in Vineland with totally enrollment of approximately 3000 students (all commuters, no student residents).

Transportation Summary

Transportation information is very important for the PRT building process. According to the 2000 census, the mean travel time in the county was 23.1 minutes. Highways that provide easy access to Cumberland County are the New Jersey Turnpike, the Garden State Parkway, Route 55, Route 322 and I-295. With the completion of Route 55 (a 40 mile length of highway that took over 20 years to build), the county has seen commerce develop as well as expansions in business and leisure. Route 55 allowed for the reduction of the drive between Cumberland and Philadelphia and also feeds into 295 and is, according to the county’s website, “Cumberland’s gateway to the world”.

Cumberland has an airport in Millville and is one of the sites of major employment for the city of Millville as it employs between 1,300 and 1,400 people and helps to generate over $30 million in payroll annually. Cumberland also has bus systems that are run by NJ Transit.

1 http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/34000.html

Cumberland County

PRT Network in Cumberland

In Cumberland, the final PRT Network is as follows:

In this image, you can see that there is a large cluster of stations in the Eastern portion of the county, which is where the majority of the population resides and also in the middle of the county toward the western border. There are areas between the two larger groups of residents that also have stations which helps to join the two networks together.. There are individual stations around the rest of the county, especially in the southeast corner of the county and in the mid to northwest areas of the county.

For our networks, we used a grid system whenever possible, and otherwise we just built loops. We used smaller loops so that the trip around the network would not take as long and so that the commuters would be able to save time wherever we could, but in certain scenarios where there are only isolated pockets of people living we had a longer track in place so that they could also be connected to the PRT network. For Cumberland, we were able to achieve a coverage rate of 86.13% through 291 stations and 182 interchanges with a total of 397.06 miles of guideway. The original goal of 90% coverage was rather

Cumberland County

difficult to achieve because there just aren’t enough residents in Cumberland for it to be profitable that way, but we did manage to end up with a coverage of 85.74%.

Network for the East part of Cumberland

The above image shows the grid formation of the network in the east of Cumberland County. The grid formation reduces the need for two way guide ways and thus is much more cost efficient.

Year Built

For our PRT network, we decided to build the entire thing over 8 years. We chose 8 years instead of 20 because we felt that 20 was too long a time horizon to look at. We felt that 8 years was long enough that we could develop the network slowly, without having to space it over such a long time span.

Cumberland County

Below is a table that indicates how many interchanges, shape points and stations were built during each year for Years 1 through 8.

PRT SummaryBelow are the summary statistics for Cumberland County.

The trip ends served per station is graphed in decreasing order.

Cumberland County

1 15 29 43 57 71 85 99 113 127 141 155 169 183 197 211 225 239 253 267 281 -

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Trip ends served per stationCumberland County

Highest to lowest

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From this we can see that if we charge a fare of $3, we can expect a P&L of about $6 million dollars. In order to build the PRT network, there is a total fixed cost of $3,280 million dollars.

We want to look at the areas where the trip ends served for certain areas because we just used the trip data from last year and so we’d suggest being more judicious with regard to the filtering of data

In addition to this fixed cost, there is also an annual recurring cost of $393 million dollars. However, with the fare set to $3 per ride and the station lease and naming rights, we should be able to make an actual profit from this network.

The following is a graph of how annual P&L would look at different fare costs. It can be seen that only from a fare of slightly above $2.50 would this project actually be worth undertaking. Since it has been proven that people are resistant to the idea of raising prices, we suggest charging a higher price upfront so that when the costs rise (due to inflation and other factors) they would not be as resistant to paying these higher prices.

Cumberland County

1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5

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Cumberland County P&L based on fare

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For the networks we scaled down the recreation trips by a constant factor so that we could get the total number of trips to a reasonable number. We also went through the data sets to remove placemarks that had ridiculous numbers of employees or visitors and the ones that were duplicates of previous placemarks. However, because we had set the stations in place already, we were unable to find them and remove them easily. In the future we recommend that students strictly filter the data given to them for the county and remove the obvious outliers. We also suggest that the students note the concept of the “wiggle effect”. Because of the way that the PRT site worked, the ridership numbers that showed up for some stations was greater than the actual number of trips that would be there (which made it look like building a station in an area was actually profitable). We recommend double checking that.