All of that once existed — and then it was all discontinued, the service halted, the tracks torn up.

Today, decades after local transportation started to revolve almost entirely around cars and highways, a new study shows the generation aged 18-34 wants access to more and better transit options, to be less reliant on cars and says access to high-quality transportation is one of the top three criteria weighed when deciding where to live, according to the Rockefeller Foundation and Transportation for America.

Yet in Atlantic City and South Jersey, recent proposals for public transit improvements — whether public rail and transit hubs or private ventures, such as monorails — all have gone nowhere, or they remain concepts on paper.

In an area recently described as one of the most compact and least-sprawling in the country, where much of the population is located along Route 9, Route 40 or the barrier islands, the expansion of public transportation remains in question.

Getting there

The Shore Fast Line, the electrified train service that connected Ocean City to Atlantic City via the Mainland towns, was shut down in the late 1940s.

“The entire Mainland will get better service with the bus substitution,” transit officials said at the time, describing the buses that would replace the trains as “practically noiseless … extremely smooth in starting and stopping.”

“Patrons awaiting the replacements are mostly optimistic,” The Press said at the time, “but there are regrets.”

The Atlantic City trolleys followed the Shore Fast Line to the junkyard in 1955, but not before remnants of their right-of-way cut through the city streets from Albany Avenue to an expressway bridge over nothing. The unusual width of Atlantic Avenue in the Downbeach towns was designed to accomodate the lines in both directions.

“They determined (the electrified trolley/train system) wasn’t making it, and they closed it down,” said Michael Busler, a professor of finance at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. “They closed it down before gambling, though. If it had been (running) when gambling came, with the increase in population from gambling and the increase in tourism, I think it probably could have made it.”

Today, NJ Transit buses cover much of the same territory, only on a reduced schedule with different routes that may require several transfers to reach one’s destination.

Michelle Rodriguez takes three buses: from Atlantic City to Pleasantville, Pleasantville to the Hamilton Mall, and the Hamilton Mall to Vineland.

“Every day,” Rodriguez said at the Pleasantville bus station, “it takes 2½ hours. And the other bus was late, so we had to wait a whole hour.”

Tatiana Waugh, of Atlantic City, had to take one bus from the Chelsea Heights section of town to the Atlantic City Bus Terminal, then catch another to Pleasantville.

“They’re horrible,” Waugh said. “They’re always late, and they don’t (care) about the schedule.”

Rodriguez said increased public transportation options would be “awesome. ... A lot of people take (public) transportation, and even people who drive cars take (public) transportation.”

But she doesn’t expect it will happen.

“They want to attract people back into the city, and part of the attraction is having some public transportation once you get here,” Busler said, adding that 80 percent of casino workers do not live in Atlantic City.

“(But) it’s a little bit of a Catch-22,” he conceded. “You don’t have a population base to support public transportation, but you don’t have a population base because you don’t have public transportation.”

Getting around the city is another issue for tourists, Busler said. The convention center and train station are located at the far end of a supposedly walkable “gateway” corridor to the Boardwalk.

“Even for people coming to vacation in Cape May County, in Ocean City, Avalon or Stone Harbor, down to Wildwood, it’s not convenient for those people to get to Atlantic City either,” Busler said. “Most end up driving, and if you go out and enjoy yourself and have a few drinks, you don’t want to worry about driving home.”

Changing lanes

There have been ambitious plans in the recent past. In 2009, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority’s Atlantic City Regional Transportation Plan laid out a detailed, three-phase plan looking ahead to the 2020s.

Highlights included creating a “major regional multimodal transportation center” at Atlantic City International Airport that would “attract auto travelers to transit and consolidate transit travelers to create the mass needed for a fixed guideway transit system” into the city.

The plan discussed creating a new light rail, or more likely a “bus rapid transit” service along the old Newfield Branch railroad right-of-way between Egg Harbor Township and Atlantic City. A new transit hub in the city would replace the current train and bus stations, which are located blocks away from each other.

“The Atlantic City jitneys provide connecting service between the rail terminal and the casinos and other city destinations, but there are some concerns over the frequency and reliability of this service,” the plan stated.

But those and other ideas, including a water taxi system, were pushed to the side during the recession.

“The plan the CRDA did was a very good, well-thought-out plan involving many stakeholders,” said Sam Donelson, former acting executive director of the South Jersey Transportation Authority. “The downturn in the economy put the plans on hold, and I think it’s a better use of money from public entities keeping (infrastructure) in a state of good repair, making targeted improvements and increasing capacity where it makes sense.”

Extending or creating a light rail “is something that has never been proposed for the A.C. area,” NJ Transit spokesman William J. Smith said. Other than the River Line from Camden to Trenton, “the only active light rail proposal in South Jersey is the Camden-Glassboro line, which is being led by the Delaware River Port Authority.”

As for getting to Atlantic City from Philadelphia, New York and North Jersey, the NJ Transit Atlantic City Line provides access to and from Philadelphia, but there are seven stops along the way, leading to trips lasting almost two hours in one direction.

Busler described how for a recent conference, he gave up on trying to bring down visitors from New York via rail and ended up renting a limo instead.

Direct service has been discussed in meetings between the city and NJ Transit, Busler said. In the meantime, the recently opened Pennsauken Transit Center, which directly connects the Atlantic City Line with the River Line, is expected to generate an extra 530 passengers each weekday for the A.C. line within the next two years.

Smith added the agency also is working on multimodal ticketing, “which would, in essence, allow someone to travel with just one ticket from, let’s say, Upper Montclair to Atlantic City. Clearly this will be an added convenience for our South Jersey and Atlantic City customers and enhance the overall experience.”

Moving forward

The most recent new transportation proposal is more modest — a Boardwalk “jitney tram” operated by the Jitney Association, which recently ended a two-week trial run.

“We’re going to assess the past few weeks and look at Boardwalk traffic, crowd control, pricing and competition with the rolling chairs,” Jitney Association President Tom Woodruff said. As to whether the service will return on a permanent basis, “Right now, no decision has been made at this point.”

The trams have been criticized by rolling chair operators as a dangerous competitor for the chairs, which are required to charge $5 for a six-block ride while the trams charged a $3 fee.

Of course, it would not be the first time the jitneys have been in a heated rivalry with a competing form of transport. An entire book of news clippings at the Atlantic City Free Public Library is labeled “Trolley-Jit Wars.” It details the battles over routes between the established trolleys and the fledgling jitneys, then mostly large black touring cars that took fares.

“Jitneys are ‘Guerillas’ storms R.R. Attorney,” one headline says.

“The jitney gives nothing but joyrides, in a way,” the lawyer said. “The jitney comes in and skims off the cream and leaves us skimmed milk, we who have to pay for the very facilities they employ to get their patronage.”

The jitneys converted to the now-familiar “jitneybuses” in 1947, shortly before their old trolley rivals disappeared.

Today, Woodruff said, the association is amenable to potential light rail projects into the city. However, the group opposes intracity proposals such as a monorail — discussed as a “third phase” proposal in the CRDA plan and in private proposals such as Win-Win OND’s plan to connect a Bader Field development with the Boardwalk.

“A lot of it is a combination of not being viable and being wildly imaginative,” Woodruff said. The monorail “logistically didn’t make sense. There are air rights, environmental concerns, different agencies getting involved, the overall price. I don’t think the system, in the end, would work. It wouldn’t make sense financially, and it wouldn’t make sense (as far) as the time it would take for completion.”

He said a light rail, on the other hand, could work.

“The reason the current rail system doesn’t work is because there’s too much time in between trains,” Woodruff said. If people had more rail options to get into the city — where they could get around via jitney — there would be less congestion on the streets and it would help preserve the roadways, he said.

“Atlantic City has a good transportation system in the jitneys,” Woodruff said. “They’re privately owned, drivers pay their own insurance. ... Atlantic City gets a public transportation system for free.”

“I don’t know why more hasn’t been done,” Busler concluded.

“They have to make it as convenient as possible for people,” he said. “They got away with it when (Atlantic City gambling) was the only game in town. But it’s not the only game in town anymore.”

Contact Steven Lemongello:

609-272-7275

SLemongello@pressofac.com

@ACPress_Steve on Twitter