Four thousand of you signed this petition. Some of you signed it in 2014 when this was just a student idea scratched out between classes. Some of you signed it last week. All of you signed it because you understood something that 12 years of legislative inaction has failed to disprove. Making transit affordable for the people who depend on it most is not a radical idea. It's an obvious one.

Here's where things stand today. More importantly, here's what you can do about it right now.

The bill is alive. Barely.

Assembly Bill A2329, introduced on January 13, 2026, would create discounted bulk transit fares for students, apprentices, and workers across New Jersey. It's been referred to the Assembly Transportation and Independent Authorities Committee. It's sitting there now. It sat in the equivalent committee in 2024, in 2023, and in 2022 without a single hearing ever being scheduled.

Three sessions. Zero hearings. Zero votes.

One person can change that.

The committee is chaired by Assemblyman Clinton Calabrese (D-36). He alone has the power to schedule a hearing on this bill. He has never been asked to do so publicly by the bill's sponsors, by advocacy organizations, or by the press.

Until now.

Here is exactly what we are asking you to do. It takes less than 3 minutes.

Contact Assemblyman Calabrese and kindly ask him to schedule a committee hearing on A2329.

📞 Phone: (201) 943-0615
📧 Email: AsmCalabrese@njleg.org

You don't need to be a policy expert. You don't need to cite all the bill numbers or any of the subsection clauses. You just need to say one sentence:

"I am asking Assemblyman Calabrese to schedule a committee hearing on A2329, the NJpass program bill, which has never received a hearing in three consecutive sessions."

That's it. That's the whole ask.

Why does a phone call matter?

Legislative offices count constituent contacts. A committee chair who receives 50 phone calls about a bill in a single week notices. A committee chair who receives 500 notices considerably more. The reason this bill has never had a hearing is not a lack of public support. 4,000 of you are proof of that. The reason is that the public support has never been directed at the single human being who controls the hearing schedule.

We're fixing that today!

If every one of the 4,000+ people who have signed this petition shared it with three people who haven't, we'd have over 12,000 signers by the end of this week. Share it with friends, family, former classmates, and current commuters. Numbers matter. A petition with 4,000 signatures is pretty easy to ignore. A petition with 20,000 is considerably harder.

Share on your favorite social media platforms. Tag Assemblyman Calabrese. Tag Speaker Coughlin. Tag Senator Diegnan. Tag Governor Sherrill. Make it impossible for them to claim they did not know this was a priority.

The technology to fix this was installed by NJ Transit last year. That means the primary remaining obstacle is political support.

The only thing standing between 4,000+ signatures and an NJ Transit U-PASS is a committee hearing that has never been scheduled.

Call Assemblyman Calabrese today. Then ask someone else to do the same.

Liam Blank
Rutgers, Class of 2017 
Author of the original 2014 U-Pass Petition