This Seat Taken?
By Anthony Buccino
If you ever commuted to work, you'll enjoy reading Anthony Buccino's latest collection "This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter" about the joys and follies of getting to and from work in the city using metropolitan public transit.
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Anthony Buccino spent 12 years editing business news copy at Dow Jones & Co. for the Ticker, NewsPlus and The Wall Street Journal professional web pages.
The company was located in Jersey City when he started and 10 years later moved to 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 cross-town traffic and the monthly parking fee, nearly enough for a car payment, persuaded the author to use mass transit for the first time ever to get to work.
For 11 years, he rode public transportation including NJ Transit buses, Newark City Subway, Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, Port Authority Trans Hudson's PATH trains, the occasional NYC subway and DeCamp buses. Kindle version of NYC commuter musings.
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.
Commuters who knew he wrote for NJ.com would seek him out and tell him their commuter tales of woe. Often they would simply commiserate and try to see who had a worse ride in that day. But more than once, Buccino was button-holed after a scathing piece on, say, homeless people's using Newark City Subway stairwells as toilets, and told that it was cleaned up within hours of his writing about it online.
Lautenberg's ship comes in
Empire State Building across the Hudson River
Hyatt Hotel in sun and shadow, Grundy Park in the foreground
Waterfalls view from Grundy Park in Jersey City