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| NJ Commuters skeptical about idea to bypass Port Authority's bus terminal (260140) | |||
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NJ Commuters skeptical about idea to bypass Port Authority's bus terminal |
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Posted by Gold_12TH on Fri May 11 19:19:58 2012 Each morning, Karl Zielaznicki boards a bus in Matawan and joins the commuter cavalcade in a 61-minute procession along America’s most-congested state, through the nation’s busiest tunnel and into the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan.That’s the easy part. Next, there’s the cattle-crossing to make it out of America’s busiest bus terminal, and the mile-long walk through the obstacle course of Manhattan to get to his East Side office in the Chrysler Building. Certainly, Zielaznicki must be cheering an idea by New Jersey Transportation Commissioner Jim Simpson to have some NJ Transit buses pick up passengers on the East Side and bypass the dreaded terminal, right? "I don’t see how this would work," Zielaznicki said. "In Midtown, it takes forever to get crosstown. At one time, the MTA estimated that the average operating speed of the 34th Street crosstown buses was only 4.5 mph." Perhaps this will be a harder sell, afterall. Thinking aloud at NJ Transit’s monthly board meeting this week, Simpson floated the idea of giving some bus riders the option of taking the Port Authority Bus Terminal out of their commuting equation. "You start the bus service on the East Side of Manhattan at 42nd Street and you make some series of stops," he said. "Rather than having all these people go to the cramped Port Authority building, you pick them up along the way. Then you get right into the (Lincoln) tunnel, rather than having everybody charge to this terminal that’s functionally obsolescent — particularly now that (bus service) demand is growing." When Stan Wrobel, NJ Transit’s deputy general manager of bus operations, noted interstate buses could be restricted by New York traffic and pedestrian patterns, Simpson responded that New York transit agencies have express bus service that travels to the city’s outer reaches. "To me, it’s a better mousetrap," Simpson said. "We can’t do much more with the existing building that we have at the Port Authority. And if you think about it, all the people that have walked to the Port Authority building, many are starting on the East Side." He asked NJ Transit officials to look into the East Side bus idea as a pilot program. NJ Transit pays the Port Authority $1.78 million a year to use the bus terminal. Simpson acknowledged there were a lot of "moving parts," between the planning and traffic and jurisdictions, but NJ Transit Executive Director Jim Weinstein said the agency would take a serious look at the idea. "We have to look at all that — but it’s worth looking at," he said. Commuter Zielaznicki said that on the rare occasions he takes the bus crosstown in the evening, it takes more than 20 minutes to travel along 42nd Street from Lexington Avenue, where his office is located, to Eighth Avenue, where the bus terminal is located. "Plus, when these new Fifth Avenue buses would get to the tunnel, they would not have direct access to the tunnel like the Port Authority Bus Terminal buses," he said. "They would have to snake around to get to the tunnel. I see no time saved and millions wasted in planning for something that won’t work." ---http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/05/commuters_skeptical_about_port.html |
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