Newark-Manhattan Public Transit

I got an email last Thursday thru my TourismNewark.org website that caused me to do a little research that I can now share with readers.

Hello I will be visiting Newark the first week of May from Vancouver Canada. Can you recommend the best way for a single person to travel from Newark to Manhattan. Thank you.

I replied:

There are trains that go to Downtown Manhattan and separate trains that go to Midtown Manhattan, all from Newark Penn Station, which is also where the train from Newark Airport goes. New Jersey Transit trains (and Amtrak trains) go to NY Penn Station (Midtown), 33rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, about 22 1/2 hours a day, from 4:54am to 2:10am, for $5 per trip.

PATH trains (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) go from Newark Penn Station to 33rd Street and Avenue of the Americas ("Sixth Avenue", in Midtown) and 24 hours a day [transfer at the 33rd Street Station in Jersey City]. PATH's Downtown trains go to the World Trade Center station, which was under the WTC Twin Towers that were destroyed on 9/11 and is near 1 World Trade Center, still under construction. Trains to both destinations cost $2 per trip at most, with a discount for a card for multiple trips. There is also a bus (the #108) from a ground-level terminal at Newark Penn Station that goes to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, 41st Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan about 19 hours a day, for $5.50 per trip.

All these trips take around a half hour (less to Downtown Manhattan by the PATH in daytime, weekdays). Bus trips are subject to substantial delays at the bottleneck of the Lincoln Tunnel, depending on traffic.
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PATH is an interstate SUBWAY system, whose seats are molded fiberglass/plastic in subway-style arrangement, along the sides of the car's long axis. NJTransit trains are commuter-train style, with padded seats across the lengthwise axis.
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As you can see, it is very easy to get between Newark and Manhattan at almost all hours of the day and nite (weekend service is less frequent, and PATH trains go via Hoboken [weekends and overnite weekdays], which makes the trip somewhat longer; be sure not to get out at the Hoboken stop, unless, of course, you want to see Hoboken, Frank Sinatra's hometown).

Cordially, L. Craig Schoonmaker, TourismNewark.org and author of the "NewarkUSA" fotoblog

Tourists are not the only people who don't realize how easy it is to get between Newark and NY. People in Manhattan who would like to move elsewhere, from which they might commute to a job they retain in Manhattan, but have thought of Newark as too far away in distance and time, may not appreciate how easy it would be to live in Newark but work in Manhattan. There are parts of the Outer Boros that are harder to commute from than Newark.
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Unfortunately, Microsoft is closing its free Microsoft Office Live Small Business websites at the end of this month, so I have to move my Tourism Newark website elsewhere. This is complicated by the fact that I registered the domain name "TourismNewark.org" thru MS Office Live, so I have to find out how to redirect that domain name to a new webhost. I also don't know if I can find a free slideshow service to display the 50 fotos or so that are presently on the Home page of the TourismNewark.org website, because Slide.com has ceased operations. It was functioning fine until bought by Google for $228 million in August 2010, but for reasons beyond my ken, Google announced a year later that it was closing it down, and Google did indeed shut it down on March 6th of this year — despite having spent all that money to buy it. Some people have more dollars than sense.
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This is the third time I will have been seriously adversely affected by major corporations' withdrawing services. The first was when AOL — which I was paying for at the time — closed all its subscribers' online-storage spaces, which removed hundreds and hundreds of fotos from the early years of this blog. Then Slide.com shut down, so some slideshows I had put into this blog vanished. And now Microsoft is forcing me to move Tourism Newark elsewhere. Let's just hope Google doesn't shut down its Picasa online-foto-album service too, or another 8,000 fotos will disappear from this blog.