This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter

This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter
By Anthony Buccino

If you ever commuted to work, you'll enjoy your ride reading Anthony Buccino's latest collection "This Seat Taken? Notes of a HaplessCommuter" about the joys and follies of getting to and from work in the city using public transit.

Buccino's bus and rail commuting tales and observations are collected in this new 224-page book which is available in print, on Amazon and Nook.

Buccino spent 12 years editing business news copy at Dow Jones & Co. for the Ticker, NewsPlus and The Wall Street Journal professional web pages in Jersey City and later at the NewsCorp building in the Times Square district of mid-town Manhattan.

For his first year working in Jersey City, Buccino actually drove the 12 miles each way to work and home. An average commute would take 20 minutes to reach the city and at least another 20 minutes to cross the city to his parking lot near the Hudson River. It wasn't long before the crosstown traffic and the monthly parking fee, nearly enough for a car payment, persuaded the author to use mass transportation to get to work for the first time ever.

For 11 of those dozen years, he rode public transportation including NJ Transit buses, Newark City Subway, Port Authority Trans Hudson's PATH trains, the occasional NYC subway and DeCamp buses.

For five years, Buccino wrote about commuting and transit in metro New York-New Jersey for NJ.com. His transit blog on NJ.com earned the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism award. Many of those blurbs are gathered in this collection.

West Side Lightrail, Jersey City, N.J.

Much building is happening along the Hudson Bergen Lightrail route in Jersey City. In July we took a ride on the air-conditioned light rail ... and here's some of what we saw.


Windmill-like worker atop lightrail overhead.


Essex Street station light posts are protected against nearby construction.

Garfield Station.

New construction along the route.

Tall building at center is One Second Street, really.

And their condos are for sale. As you can see, it's a short walk to the light rail. What you can't see, is it's a short walk to the ferry, too, and the Path.


This fellow sat in front of us.

Do remember to click on the photos to see large version and detail

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.