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November 27, 2001

TUNNEL VISION: PATH Trains No Longer Genteel Ride

By RANDY KENNEDY

Compared with the New York City subway, the PATH system has always seemed a little like an exhibit at a world's fair, titled "The Fabulous Future of Commuting!"

PATH trains are whispery. Their tunnels are honeycombed, like something designed by Buckminster Fuller. The stations are long and silvery, equipped with television screens that scroll the morning headlines. (Yesterday, one could learn from ABC about the plight of emu farmers: "Emu meat. It's Not What's for Dinner.")

If there was a problem with the system, many riders said, it was that it seemed to be operating in a future that had just passed, with stations a little too small and trains a little too infrequent to handle the new people who have packed the suburbs that rely on the system.

Since Sept. 11, and the loss of two of the PATH's 13 stations, those shortcomings have stood out in sharp relief. And every weekday morning for the last several weeks, the human reminder of the shortcomings has also stood out, on the sidewalk, in front of the Christopher Street station. He wears a dark blue Port Authority police uniform and a sidearm and a stern expression. His job is to block people from entering between 7 and 9:45 a.m., because there are simply too many people downstairs during those hours just trying to get out.

"Sorry, sir," said Officer John Noble, who was doing the job yesterday and intercepted an elderly man in mid-jog toward the stairs. "Can't come in here until 9:45." The man looked around, as if he had just been told that the law of gravity was being rescinded. "What do you mean?" he asked. "I've got to get uptown."

Officer Noble, a very large man with a very sympathetic tone in his voice, told him the very unpleasant news: he could wait 45 minutes or he could get a train farther north at the Ninth Street station, which is less crowded. The man spun on his heel and hurried indignantly along Christopher Street. "He's one of the few," Officer Noble explained. "Most people already know by now."

What they know, is this: While it might not look like it, or sound like it — and usually does not smell like it — the PATH now feels a lot more like the overcrowded subway during rush hours and sometimes even long after. Until repairs are made in Lower Manhattan, which could take two years, the resemblance between the two systems will probably only increase.

And Christopher Street, which has become the southernmost station in the city and is absorbing many of the 66,000 passengers a day who once used the World Trade Center stop, will probably feel worse than any subway station.

As Officer Noble stood upstairs outside the station yesterday, the scene downstairs was beginning to look like a big tube of toothpaste.

There is only one exit from the station, a narrow one at the front end, reached through three turnstiles. By 8:30, as trains from Hoboken and Newark began to arrive with more and more people, many of them pressed like specimens against the window glass, one trainload had not yet had time to make its way through the turnstiles and up the long staircase before another load poured out of the next  train and stacked up behind them.

The crowds have become so thick near that end of the station that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the system, recently removed benches on the platform, so people would have more room to stand. Quick adapters have learned to ride near the front of the train and to sprint to the turnstiles when the train doors open, which can save more than a minute as the commuters slowly ascend to daylight.

Others have not managed to adapt at all. One woman squeezed out of the back of a packed train about 8:15 and promptly sank to her knees on the platform, lightheaded because of the crush. Officer Noble helped her up.

"The PATH, to me, has always been a little more, I don't know, genteel than the subway," said John Rohde, an official with the city's Human Resources Administration, who rides in from Newark. "Not anymore." In the late afternoon, when the flow of commuters reverses, the same scene develops along Christopher Street,
as people line up down the block and around the corner, waiting to go downstairs to catch a train. "You should have seen it," said one Village resident, who did. "It looked like somebody was handing out free tickets to `The Producers' in there."

Mr. Rohde, 57, who has been taking the PATH since 1985, tried his best to act as if it all did not bother him so much. Then he was honest. "I'm only a couple of months away from retirement," he said.

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