To understand why NJ Transit is facing a fiscal crisis, you have to go back to the agency’s founding, said Philip Mark Plotch, a Fair Lawn resident and a senior researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington-based nonprofit that shapes public debate on transportation issues…. Garett Shrode, a policy analyst at the Eno Center for Transportation, said NJ Transit and similar legacy transit systems, including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, still rely heavily on fares to balance their operating budgets — which is what doomed them when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.