Rant: Unannounced PATH Schedule Change
Saturday (10/3) morning, I tried to take the train scheduled to depart WTC for NWK at 06:30, but the train wasn't there. Turns out NWK-WTC trains were running at 25-minute intervals until early morning instead of the usual 20 around that time. No announcement was made whatsoever regarding this modified schedule on either the PATH app, website or X. I ended up missing a connecting Amtrak train b/c of this (and in spite of the 22-minute buffer I added for the connection time).
When I reached out to Port Authority, they insisted they did make this announcement on X, but all it said was that the boarding platform had changed. They wouldn't admit any error in not having publicly communicated the modified service.
No, I'm not new to JC, and I've known trains are unreliable in this country, so I made sure I was prepared by subscribing to all possible alerts and adding schedule buffers if necessary. Clearly that wasn't enough. Should I have done something differently? Is there anything we can do to make PATH better, or should we just accept the fact that this is what they're going to do, and we only need to take what they give?
I'm a big believer in public transit, and I cherish the fact that JC is one of the very few cities in North America that even has a functioning metro. But episodes like these make me almost lose trust in anything government-run and turn me into a tired skeptic.