PA to commuters: Wait 20 years for better bus, rail service

This cartoon from Mike Lukovich equates GOP repeal of the Affordable Care Act with terrorism against the American people.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Staff Writer Paul Berger of The Record has been so busy chronicling the transportation war between New York and New Jersey he buried the lead today on funding of a new bus terminal in Manhattan.

Deep in his Page 1 report on Thursday's meeting of Port Authority commissioners, Berger quotes the board chairman as saying a new midtown bus terminal may take as long as 20 years to complete (6A).

Yikes! Does that mean the 230,000 bus commuters who pour into Manhattan every day, most of them from New Jersey, won't see any relief until then?

And does that also mean they'll be fighting over rush hour seats for another 20 years, because The Record isn't prodding Port Authority officials to expand service immediately by adding more exclusive bus lanes into and out of the Lincoln Tunnel?

The bi-state agency's capital plan also includes billions to double rail capacity between New Jersey and Manhattan, but Berger provides no estimate of when those tunnels will be finished.

And as I understand it, when the new Gateway tunnels are finished, the old ones, or at least one of them, will be shut down for repairs, so service might not "double" for another 20 years.

Food Editor Esther Davidowitz of The Record.

Food crawl

When Friday rolls around at the Gannett-owned Record, it's time for another "food crawl" (Better Living).

This one focuses on only four of the many great food businesses in Englewood, but the author is none other than Food Editor Esther Davidowitz, who warns readers "this is not your low-cal, low-carb, low-fat, sugar-free crawl" (10BL and 11BL). 

Well, it could have been, if Davidowitz didn't completely miss the restaurant-quality Meals To Go at Jerry's Gourmet & More, her fourth and last stop on the South Dean Street crawl.

These take-out dinners -- with seafood, chicken, pork or beef, plus pasta or potatoes and vegetables -- are at $7.99 a sane alternative to Jerry's $12-a-pound stuffed eggplant or $17 a pound poached salmon.

Fish, linguine with white clam sauce, and broccoli were just three of the items in one of Jerry's Meals To Go -- complete, restaurant-quality take-out dinners for $7.99, below.

If the freshly prepared store-made dinners aren't sold out at 4 p.m., they are marked down to $5.99.

Editions I missed

Image by stephenhanafin via Flickr

On Tuesday, Sept. 14, The Record and Columnist Mike Kelly continued their Page 1 smear campaign against the imam who is behind the proposed mosque near Ground Zero. I can't recall any stories about other apartment landlords in North Jersey, including those who own buildings in Paterson and Passaic.


I also can't recall any stories smearing the shore rabbi who is at the center of the biggest corruption scandal in New Jersey history -- the one that brought down numerous officials, including the cocky young mayor of Hoboken -- or the paper railing against the synagogue he is affiliated with. Is Kelly targeting the imam because he is Muslim?

Just below Kelly's diatribe is an A-1 story on Governor Christie's cuts to after-school programs for 9,000 children of the working poor. Shame on Christie, who continues to live large and cater to such millionaires as the Borgs and his rich, fat-cat supporters.

In Local, a family with seven dogs continues getting better coverage than many towns, and photos are blown up as big as possible to take up the space of local news that was never filed.

I have two problems with Sachi Fujimori's Better Living story on sustainable seafood. Recommending big-eye and albacore tuna flies in the face of everything I've read about high mercury levels in those fish. 

And while Costco's sources for farmed fish are condemned by Greenpeace, the warehouse store gets no credit for selling a wide variety of fresh and frozen wild-caught fish and other seafood.

On Sunday, Sept. 12, free-spending food writer Elisa Ung recommends "gourmet" takeout dinners for $10.95 to $14.95, some of them frozen. I will match the restaurant-quality takeout dinners from Jerry's Gourmet & More in Englewood ($6.99) against any of them.  And I'll give you a piece of sound advice she neglects: Plate your food and heat it in the microwave; don't reheat food in plastic takeout containers.

(Photo: Manhattan and New Jersey.)