A Shot of Orange Juice (the Blog)

For those of you who know me, you know I take public transit to work every day. Now I recently moved (maybe more on that later) but by moving I’ve changed my daily routine of walking 5 minutes to the train station to experimenting for Public Transit in my new place.

For those of you who don’t know me, I live in New Jersey (about 13 miles outside of Manhattan) and work in “the city”, technically Downtown Brooklyn, which many wouldn’t consider the city at all. Although the big boss keeps suggesting we might be moving into Manhattan at some point next year.

Anyway, so NJ Transit trains are fairly reliable, however I was one of the “lucky” who was stuck on the train under the tunnel for 3 hours. http://gothamist.com/2011/09/22/power_outage_leaves_four_trains_stu.php

Since I also have AT&T, I was able to keep myself entertained with my Nook and my Nintendo DS since I didn’t have the luxury of having the internet or phone service like the Verizon customers on my train… Anyway, in general the trains are very consistent, sometimes being clogged, but hardly taking more than 40 minutes (as opposed to the 30 they are estimated to take) to make a one way trip.

My new location is much further from the train I was taking (I could either walk about a mile to the closest stop, or my town also has a shuttle that I can take down to the train station I was previously taking, and do that. I haven’t quite done that in the mornings yet, as I’m barely awake enough to eat cereal and read some morning emails. But I have taken it home a few times (albeit to my old apartment, which still has a few things left behind). But it’s given me an interesting perspective on things.

1. Taking the DeCamp bus into the city isn’t really all that bad. I haven’t quite figured out the schedule yet, and there seems to be less consistency of when they actually arive. But my walk to the bus stop is much less than my old walk, since it picks up right at the end of my block.
2. Taking the DeCamp bus out of the city has the privilege of sitting on Route 3 the parking lot if any accidents or similar causation occur.
3. Although, I have been leaving work at a similar time and getting home at a similar time as long as the bus doesn’t have to stop because of traffic based on an accident.
4. I have the ability to take the bus up to my favorite bar http://www.cloverleaftavern.com which I guess I could have done before, but now it’s part of the flow of my evening commute instead of being a hassle and full planning ahead type of thing.
5. DeCamp “monthly” passes aren’t month long ones, like the NJTransit passes. When I buy 40 tickets at a discount, I’m literally getting 40 one way passes from it. When I buy a monthly NJ Transit ticket, I can ride NJ Transit all I want for that month, but that’s it. If I take a vacation for a week, then it’s not worth getting the pass for NJ Transit. For DeCamp, if I take a vacation for a week, then I just finish using up those tickets one week later then I normally would have.

Posted on December 21st, 2011 by tehdiplomat
Filed under: life