Dear Editor:
The letter below was sent to Robert E. Boyle, President, PATH, One PATH Plaza, Jersey City, October 23, 1997. It offered a simple solution to some of the overcrowding on the PATH trains during the morning rush hour. If the three express trains from Newark were ended, several hundred people along the Newark-World Trade Center line would get to work in a timely manner. The trains run half empty sometimes. I think my idea makes even more sense today than when I sent the letter in 1997:
“Every weekday morning, I drop my son off at school and make it to the Grove Street station just in time to see the WTC express sailing by, more than often not, half empty. Can you explain the logic of sending a half empty train into the World Trade Center so that a few people can get there two minutes faster while the rest of us crowd onto the next two trains like cattle? It’s bad enough that the Newark passengers park themselves a foot away from each other and refuse to move to let the rest of us in, even when asked face to face. Why, on top of this rude behavior, are these few favored over the rest of us, particularly as the express train still has to run on a local track behind other local trains and still sits in the tunnel just like every other train?
When people complain to your customer service people at WTC on PATH Thursdays, their response is that they receive many similar complaints, and they agree that it makes no sense. I don’t know who Eng-Wong, Taub & Associates surveyed on the subject of the express trains, but it certainly wasn’t anyone who tried to get on the train in downtown Jersey City.”
Karen Lorentz