For five years, Anthony Buccino wrote about commuting and transit in metro New York-New Jersey for NJ.com. His transit blog on NJ.com earned the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism award. Many of those blurbs are gathered in this collection.
Commuters who knew he wrote for NJ.com would seek him out and tell him their commuter tales of woe. Often they would simply commiserate and try to see who had a worse ride in that day. But more than once, Buccino was button-holed after a scathing piece on, say, homeless people trashing the Newark Subway, and told that it was cleaned up within hours of his writing about it online.
For the most part, the items in This Seat Taken? are short, so readers and commuters can pick it up and read at random, or read as far as they can before their own stop. Then, it's easy to pick up where you left off or try pot-luck in the four sections of the book.
Buccino spent 12 years editing business news copy at Dow Jones & Co. for the Ticker, NewsPlus and The Wall Street Journal professional web pages. The company was located in Jersey City when he started and 10 years later moved to the NewsCorp building in the Times Square district of mid-town Manhattan.
For his first year in Jersey City, Buccino actually drove the 12 miles each way to work and home. An average commute would take 20 minutes to reach the city and at least another 20 minutes to cross the city to his parking lot near the Hudson River.
It wasn't long before the crosstown traffic and the monthly parking fee, nearly enough for a car payment, persuaded the author to use mass transportation for the first time ever to get to work.
For 11 of those dozen years, he rode public transportation including NJ Transit buses, Newark City Subway, Port Authority Trans Hudson's PATH trains, the occasional NYC subway and DeCamp buses.
These are his notes of some of those rides.
