U2 Concert: Last Night’s Commuter Nightmare

Thursday, Sep 24, 2009 10:45am | COMMENTS (19)

U2 plays the Meadowlands again tonight, but will there be a repeat performance of the hysteria at Penn Station? 1010 Wins reports fans that crowded Penn at rush hour to get to the concert were not allowed to board without tickets, creating a massive crowd at the NJ transit ticket machines.
Clever Commute is warning folks to consider leaving earlier or plan for delays. What’s your plan?

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19 Comments

POSTED BY profwilliams | September 24, 2009 @ 11:01 am
My plan?
Watch U2 Live at Red Rocks. Or maybe the Live in Boston DVD I have.
I hate crowds.
Not sure who I would sit in traffic for….
POSTED BY Tonoose | September 24, 2009 @ 11:14 am
It wasn’t much fun riding a bus from PABT to Lyndhurst, either. Added about an hour to my trip.
Made me think: What a great place to put a center of entertainment. Maybe those football teams should play at rush hour, too.
We all got to see what Xanadu looks like at night, or was that a nightmare? What ever.
Can’t wait til Bruce gets to clog the roadways, soon.
POSTED BY walleroo | September 24, 2009 @ 11:33 am
I have one question: Whither jerseygurl?
POSTED BY MontclairExPat | September 24, 2009 @ 11:49 am
Just walking into Penn Station last night was a nightmare.
Thankfully, living in Summit now, I can take trains which bypass Secaucus and aren’t crowded with concert-goers.
I felt really sorry for the commuters who couldn’t get on their regular trains due to overcrowding.
I may actually go through Hoboken for tonight’s commute home to avoid what is sure to be a repeat of last night’s scenario.
POSTED BY jerseygurl | September 24, 2009 @ 12:17 pm
Oh hello Walleroo. As usual, I took the Hoboken train. No problems on the PATH. No delays on the train. I even had a 3 seater to myself (along with my canine companion). NJT really needs to start paying more attention to adding more trains and upgrading service on that line instead of taking away trains and stops in an effort to get more people using the Penn direct service which cost them sooooooo much money.
POSTED BY walleroo | September 24, 2009 @ 12:21 pm
No problems… No delays…
Drats!
(along with my canine companion)
You really shouldn’t talk about your husband that way.
POSTED BY Opinionated | September 24, 2009 @ 1:23 pm
Was that also the reason for the major traffic slowdown on route 3 at around 12:30?
POSTED BY Git2itGal | September 24, 2009 @ 2:06 pm
U2 mania sounding like the milk run at the A&P at the mere suggestion of snow…
Circumstances delivered me at Penn Sta rather than Hoboken in time for the 6:18, where I had brief encounteres with several cheerfully boisterous strangers who clogged the center seats and aisles for all of about 8 minutes before leaving us with a blissfully library-like train for the remainder of the post-Secaucus trip. Really no biggie.
But inquiring minds do want to know what happens between Secaucus and the ‘sports complex’ – bus? light rail? train? long march?
POSTED BY MellonBrush | September 24, 2009 @ 2:09 pm
Opionionated,
Partially. The increased traffic volume was compounded by lane closures (3 lanes merging to 1) for road work near the Route 21 exit. It took us almost 2 hours to get from our seats to our home after the concert with almost an hour just getting out of the stadium parking lot.
I saw someone firing up a charcoal grill at almost midnight. They obviously were goint to have a gnosh before leaving the stadium to go home – a good strategy if you don’t have to go to work the next day!
POSTED BY Doc | September 24, 2009 @ 2:59 pm
This is why people would rather drive than actually take mass transit.
A complete failure by NJT. No surprise there. They didn’t REALIZE a few extra thousand concert goers would burden the system?
Add a few (even two) specials from Penn to Secaucus to get the people out of Penn Station. Have folks at Penn Station making annoucements like the MTA does at major events… They could have told the folks that some could buy their tickets at Secaucus, reminded people to buy round trip tickets, directed them to the right trains, etc.,
The only people using their brains were a few conductors who were not charging the surcharge for buying tickets on the train. You had some regular commuters who weren’t about to wait in 40 minute lines to buy a ticket.
This was the first trial of the new Meadowlands Station for a concert AT RUSH HOUR. And NJT appeared to have not even given it a thought.
POSTED BY jerseygurl | September 24, 2009 @ 3:15 pm
FYI dzrrxd, my husband drove an it took him two hours to get home from work and he left the city around 5:45.
POSTED BY gillie13 | September 24, 2009 @ 3:23 pm
I think I know someone who is selling their U2 tickets for tonights show. They are lower tier if anyone is interested.
POSTED BY Conductor Josh | September 24, 2009 @ 4:40 pm
I was at Penn last night…and I have never seen anything like it. At 5:50, the ticket lines snaked back to the escalator for the 7 ave entrance.
FWIW, it looked orderly…but -man- what lines.
POSTED BY 13% Annual Tax Increas | September 24, 2009 @ 7:03 pm
My wife just called from Penn Station at 6:10. The madness continues tonight.
POSTED BY grrrrrmom | September 24, 2009 @ 11:08 pm
I was on the 5:45 tonight. Not nearly as bad as last night in the main area, but definitely a boisterous crowd on the first leg of the trip, with a peculiar sweet smell wafting through my car…
POSTED BY Stiv Bators | September 25, 2009 @ 2:27 am
News item on TV Ch. 2 tonight about transport to/from the shows.
Good news is that 20,000 of the audience took the trains each night. Hooray for mass transit. Imagine how much worse the roads & parking lots would have been clogged if those folks had been in cars.
Bad news is that NJT, after months of hyping the Train To The Stadium, was totally unprepared for a crowd of this size. Multiple stories of 2-hour waits on the platform to get on the shuttle train after the show.
Worse news is that the NJT rep interviewed on air still seemed to think that the operation was a success. Hello? Hello? Is anybody in there?
I am a big fan of the NJT trains, I always use them to travel to NYC, but I have to admit that they really dropped the ball on this one. Hope somebody in management learned some lessons & responds accordingly.
POSTED BY jerseygurl | September 25, 2009 @ 7:24 am
Crank, you have obviously never had any dealings with NJT. Unlike most businesses that value loyal customers, NJT treats us all with disdain. They have to tolerate our complaints, and when they are excessive enough to include elected officials they send “customer relations” representatives who don’t even bother to feign concern or interest and then ignore anything and everything they hear.
POSTED BY Stiv Bators | September 25, 2009 @ 12:58 pm
JG, you may well be right. I gather that you folks who have the misfortune to live in Essex County have some issues with NJT.
I live in Bergen County. Service on the Bergen County line has been excellent. I haven’t had cause to register a complaint in the 19 years I’ve lived here. I commuted to NYC daily for 11 of those years. Obviously we’ve had different experiences.
The attitude of the spokesman on that newscast last night seems right in line with what you describe.
POSTED BY sabs | September 28, 2009 @ 11:56 am
My plan:
Until NJT can get their act together and realize that a rush hour concert will impact the system I say that on those days commuters refuse to give or pay for tickets on the way home.
I wrote a letter to NJT after a week long horrible crowding and delay at Penn Station last spring and got the reply back,
“the system was built for 200,000 at capacity and now serves 500,000 daily”
So obviously until those new tunnels get built there WILL be delays.
But what NJT could do is require concert goers to take specific trains to games and shows. What they could do is have the concert and game owners (AHEM meadowlands!!!) pay for additional crowd support in Penn Station on those days. What they could do is assign tracks to each train regularly instead of having us all wait like cattle at a meat market in that overcrowded waiting space (as they do in EVERY OTHER TRAIN STATION IN THE WORLD).
I am pregnant and was pushed down the stairs that night and had a panic attack on the train. It was horrible, the worst night of commuting I have ever had in 3 years on the Montclair line.
Shame on you NJT! It’s time the commuters rallied and refused to allow YOUR lack of creativity in solving YOUR overcrowding problem.

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