This morning, the Wall Street Journal made a shocking announcement related to the Port Authority. No, it wasn't another Bridgegate scoop—it was the revelation that the agency would be cutting all weekend PATH service between the World Trade Center station in lower Manhattan and the Exchange Place station in Jersey City.
The WSJ's story is mostly about how the Port Authority's $580 million plan for signal improvement will cost about $50-60 million more, "The rising cost is being driven in part by a decision reached in December, shortly after a fatal Metro-North train crash in the Bronx, to ensure that the 21-mile PATH train system complies with a federal mandate to install anti-collision systems by the end of 2015."
The PATH website has information about the shutdown, under the clever title "A PATH Forward": "Every weekend in 2014, beginning February 14-16 and excluding major holidays, PATH service will be suspended to and from the World Trade Center and Exchange Place Stations to allow the Port Authority to advance critical signal system work to meet the federal mandate of installing Positive Train Control technology by December 31, 2015, continuing security work, as well as ongoing post-Sandy repair and resiliency work. In addition to safety and security enhancements, this work will provide PATH riders increased reliability in the future, as well as laying the ground work for increased passenger capacity as early as 2016."
Gothamist's own Dan Dickinson, who lives in Jersey City, breaks down the problem:
This isn't the first time the WTC PATH line has been suspended in the name of Sandy recovery. The Port Authority pulled the same move for three weekends in November 2013: same call about power scrubbing, same equipment replacement. But even during the height of Sandy, I don't recall being threatened with a year-long outage.
Like the R tunnel shutdown or those weekends where the L doesn't cross the river, the shutdown wouldn't disable getting in and out of JC, but it would make it tremendously inconvenient. The only remaining route is through the Journal Square-Hoboken-33rd Street line, which is already overloaded most weekends and involves a fantastic 10 minute layover in Hoboken. (Guess it hasn't yet struck the Port Authority to offer shuttle buses, or ferry service, or fare reimbursement, or anything even resembling a make-nice.)
It's easy to go "lol who cares about jersey", but it's not just people on the Jersey side that would be impacted. Getting to Newark International from downtown Manhattan or Brooklyn on the weekend now becomes much more complicated - you might as well take NJT directly from Penn Station and forget about even trying the PATH. And Lower Manhattan could lose out on the constant stream of tourists who stay on the NJ side (who are always packing those weekend trains to WTC).
Indeed—the WSJ points out, "The shutdown of the transit line comes just months before the expected May opening of the 9/11 Memorial Museum."
