Dolomiti, you seem to be missing the point. I'm not complaining that service frequencies aren't high enough in the day. I'm pointing out that they can be higher if they need to be to meet increasing ridership. In that sense, increased service frequency is a side benefit of increased population.

People who are against all new development complain that PATH is already full, as if there is no flexibility in frequency and capacity in PATH, but this is not true. PATH is far from its max capacity. There is lots of room to expand capacity as ridership increases. Since it costs money to do so, as you point out, the PA doesn't do so unless it has to (but it does if the ridership increases).

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Extension of Harrison Station is costing about $138m, according to the PA's 2014 Capital Plan. That might sound like a lot, but it's a drop in the bucket in the PA's $30B capital plan. And it's 1/9 of the $1.7 billion that the PA is spending to extend PATH to the airport to satisfy just 6,000 daily riders. The PA can cough up the money for 10-car service if it needs to for its 278,000 daily riders.

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It'll increase capacity about 10%, which, compounded with the 25%-43% increases enabled by the move from 7-8 car trains to 10 car trains, gives you 37%-57% increases in capacity.

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Railcars have limited service lives. You could add open gangway cars gradually as the demand increases and old cars are decomissioned. It doesn't need to be done right away--the increased frequencies that start in 2018 will give the PA some breathing room to plan for this. It's not like the population of Jersey City and PATH ridership go up by 20% overnight. And again, the costs would pale in comparison to PATH's budget. A rail car costs about $2.5M...and it's a cost that you need to account for no matter what.

The MTA already has a plan to begin replacing its cars with open gangway cars in the next decade. Last time the PA ordered cars, it went in on the MTA's order and ordered the same cars (the PA-5 is a slightly modded version of the MTA's R-160 cars). They could do the same again with the MTA's new open gangway cars.

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This really shows that you don't know much about how the PA is run or what the PA's big costs are. Labor is one of them. Running more trains means more labor costs for conductors and operators. That's why PATH has 35-minute intervals between trains late at night, instead of running shorter trains more frequently. They basically never shorten their trains. Anyway, 20-minute headways didn't stop the Port Authority from building the current NJT AirLink station to the airport, and it hasn't stopped people from taking that train.

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If anything, car traffic goes down when people have retail options and restaurants that they can walk to. But nobody wants to open retail or restaurants when the population density isn't there to support an adequate customer base...

Seriously, anyone who wants to see a REAL traffic nightmare, I suggest you take a trip out to Staten Island sometime. Half the density of Jersey City, but killer traffic.

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A dirty little secret about the PATH train is that they run service at precisely the frequency that makes sure it is packed NO MATTER how many riders there are...I've seen trains packed at 11am, when the ridership volume is about 1/3 of what it is at rush hour. Why? Because they run less frequently when there are fewer riders. Why do you think they only run it once every 35 minutes at night or only once every 10/15 minutes at 8pm or at noon? If you have more riders, they will provide more frequent service. The only true bottleneck is at rush hour. But the PA's latest capital plan calls for buying more cars now that the new signal system has been installed. That should increase frequency/capacity about 18% starting in 2018. Guess what? They never would've bought the cars to increase rush hour frequency if ridership hadn't increased. Capacity can further be increased about 50% in the future by accomodating 10-car trains and cars with open gangways. These aren't insanely expensive moves--they are feasible, and the PA has already done studies on 10-car operation and started construction on the station modifications that would be necessary.

Even if we leveled half of downtown into a giant parking lot (which many people here would love), the PATH would STILL be packed, because they'd just reduce service frequency to compensate. And on top of that, you'd be waiting 20 minutes for that packed train. That's exactly how the Staten Island Rapid Transit trains are run.

At the end of the day, more people actually means more frequent service on public transit.

I'm not sure I see your point, exart. This block of Perrine is just as walkable as most of Downtown, and more walkable than McGinley Square, as several others already pointed out. We're talking about a spot 5 minutes' walk from the Journal Square PATH stop. I live a couple of blocks away from Perrine on Tuers, and I haven't owned a car for 5 years.


You might need a car where you live, but it sounds like it's a lot farther from the Bergen Ave retail corridor and the PATH station than Perrine Ave is. This place isn't a 15-minute walk from PATH, it's literally a 5-minute walk away. Why are you assuming your situation applies to all of JSQ, especially the areas closer to the PATH?

It's unrealistic to think that car owners would move into a building with no parking in a neighborhood where getting parking is such a hassle. If you own a car, why would you pay a premium to live so close to the PATH and in the middle of one of the biggest traffic and parking clusterf*cks in the city? Your building is another story, because it came with a parking garage, so of course most of the people who bought there brought cars. The truth is that this building will mostly attract carless people, or it'll fail to rent out (which would be the landlord's problem). From my own apartment searches in the area I can tell you that there's robust demand for apartments this close to the PATH from people who want to live car-free, so I don't think the landlord would have a problem.


Forcing developers to include parking screws over people who want to live car-free, because you're forced to pay for the cost of the parking spot in your rent whether you want it or not. Building a structured parking spot costs about $40,000 per spot, and you can bet that developers pass that on to the tenants.