NYC Sucks

As many of you know, I live in the "NYC Metro Area", specifically, downtown Jersey City, NJ (in an area often referred to as "Wall Street West" for the heavy concentration of financial firms here). At any rate, I had to go into our Manhattan office recently - no biggie, I'd been there many times before and knew exactly the most efficient route to get there, right? Not so fast. In order to get from New Jersey over to Manhattan, you have to take the PATH train - again, no issue, since I do that quite often to get into the city for pleasure.

Well, the PATH train stop that I get off at to go to our office right by the Staten Island Ferry Terminal is WTC. They are obviously doing a lot of construction down there, and have been for some time. But what they did last weekend takes the cake for inconvenience to commuters - they closed the very heavily used sidewalk south of the station on Church street for "ongoing construction". It used to be that you could go straight south to Liberty Street - a few months back they closed that portion of the sidewalk - an inconvenience, but not a really huge one. Now they've closed the entire thing, which I knew about before going over there, but not really concerned about - until I got there and saw a mob of people, all trying to get across one crosswalk, no matter where they were going - it wound up being a sort of pedestrian gridlock.

I have no idea how long this construction that they're referring to is "ongoing" for, but let's hope a relatively short period of time.