I Work From Home and You Don't

There are always too many people milling around the station. They have time to sit around, read a newspaper, have coffee or breakfast, or wait in line to buy a magazine or a winning lottery ticket out of this rat race. Well, that is what it's all about. I mean we all want to get out of this rat race. 

We know the rats are winning. Remember that ugly blue-striped building? We go to work every day so we can some day stay home and not go to work. There are plenty of good jobs in the city, plenty for us to leave when we get tired of the crowds, the endless walks, the broken sidewalks, tripping potholes, sudden-stopping tourists, Bible spouting commuters. 

If we look long enough we'll see Murray the groundhog frolicking in the safe zone under the catenary wires. Murray is fat, dumb and happy. He doesn't have to commute to work in the city. Neither these days does Proud Mary, nor I. I write from home.... 

Continue reading This Seat Taken

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.

Bus driver McGrumplesteen

Standing in the wet snow as more wet snow falls on our head, we decided to take the next bus that came along and it turned out to be the DeCamp #8412 driven by the ever so delightful driver Grumpy McGrumplesteen. In one moment aboard that bus, we already knew that when we got off in New York, our day was going to be much, much better than this ride.

continue reading Bus driver McGrumplesteen at your service

This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter

By Anthony Buccino

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Copyright © 2011 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

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Ever Miss Catching The Bus by thatmuch?

Would-Be Passenger 26 On The 199

Heading home after a long busy day at work, you hustle and push your way through the crowds of tourists and slow-pokes, walking as fast as you can without looking like you're rushing or about to break a sweat. One thing on your mind, get to the bus terminal and get on the bus and get home. Is that three things or one? No time to think about it, it's going home time....

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Public Transit Gives Us Reasons To Complain

"That's what we do. Complain.

We complain the cars are cold. We complain the cars are too hot.

We complain when the cars leak water in the rain.

We complain the fare's too high...."

Continue reading: Commuters love to complain

Paying to park, a day earlier

Back in the day when some of these parking lots were free to park in, you could simply buy your pass and go. Now, you have to buy a parking space, too, for the month and hope it's still there when you show up.

The solution to the parking space scrim is to make the monthly passes available a day earlier so that the people who don't read these press releases will be surprised when they can't get a space. Perhaps the ticket machine knows how many parking spots it can sell?

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Copyright © 2008 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

PATH Car Away From Ninevah III

Bare Naked Beach

Some people get upset riding backwards while traveling, say on the lightrail, the train, or a streetcar to St. Charles.

It seems that things move away - probably evokes the feeling of falling off a high cliff and not landing until the next stop.

It's odd to see the sun set in the east. But we're so grateful to be on the lightrail heading home, many of us scurried en masse down three flights of stairs to get on this car.

Facing backwards, looking out the window, see the brown leaves of the dying weeds, the buzz cut of the tree limbs that dog the catinery lines.

This subway car is full of people with tales to tell. They chatter away with different accents, speaking in pairs about who knows what.

The closer this car gets to the next bus departure time, the slower this car percolates.

This would be the night I sit next to the middle linebacker who spent the day riding a horse.



At Branch Brook Station, we see the tall building a half block away to the north. A huge chunk of the brick siding has fallen away.

Our bus driver, #31600 on the 93H points out the building, so we'll have something to talk about when we get home to our families.

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

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74 Bus - 6:38 to Paterson

Here I am, a mild mannered reporter for an obscure web log named after a TV character half the people reading blogs never heard of since the show aired about 40 years ago. A week like this one makes you wish you had a larger audience, no?Three times in one September week, the 6:38 NJ Transit 74 Paterson bus pulled out on me after I'd exited the Newark City Subway and crossed the platform.

That's 3 of 5 times in one week the driver of the 6:38 bus took off when I was close enough to the door to spit on him … If I had any spit left.

The first time I was within spitting distance of the bus door when it closed and pulled away.

The second time I had crossed the station and was within ten feet when he closed the door and pulled away.

And the third time I saw the empty bus pull up as I was crossing the platform, the doors opened and no one got on or off. As I got closer, the doors closed and the driver pulled off.

This occurrence seems to have stepped up in the past few weeks. I noticed three specific times in one week, but I began to wonder how many other times, and believe me, there were other times this happened.

You can't complain to the station manager - there's only a guy in the booth between the light rail ramps and he says he has nothing to do with the buses. He said you have to go to Grove Street to find a supervisor.

Nobody's in charge and nobody cares. That's the perception. The bus drivers want to drive empty buses.

While Tom Cruise's Maverick character had a better shot at TOP GUN than I'll have of being a roving reporter for a large national newspaper based near Wall Street, I can have my say right here in this obscure little blog.

NJ Transit - News Item: Hiring Spies

I'm thinking of going into the spy business. Oh, what tales I'd tell!


Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

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