Corey Kronengold was not one of those satisfied customers. Mr. Kronengold, who lives in Livingston, N.J., and normally rides a New Jersey Transit train from South Orange to Penn Station, rode PATH from Hoboken to Midtown for two weeks last month. The train was dependably on time, he said, but he abandoned that route because he found the cars to be “crowded to the point of being unsafe.” They were stuffed with so many people that the air-conditioners were overmatched.

“It’s a lousy way to start your day,” said Mr. Kronengold, 43, a marketing executive with IgnitionOne.

The PATH system is allowing diverted New Jersey Transit passengers to transfer to and from Manhattan free, as is the New York Waterway ferry that docks at Hoboken Terminal. But Mr. Kronengold said that some evenings, as he rushed to get back to Hoboken, there were no attendants to let him through the turnstiles at the 33rd Street PATH station.

After two weeks, he said, he switched to the ferry, which provides shuttle buses in Manhattan that he can ride to within a few blocks of his office, north of Times Square. He is still spending far less time with his 18-month-old daughter, but the commute is less hellish, he said.

PATH has been the target of plenty of criticism in its long history. It was the original railroad between New Jersey and Manhattan, its first tube under the Hudson having opened in 1907. That was a few years before the tunnel that connects Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains to Penn Station.

Back then, the railroad was known as the Hudson & Manhattan and its Hudson Terminal stood where the World Trade Center was later built. After the H.&M. went bankrupt, it was acquired by the Port Authority and renamed the Port Authority Trans-Hudson in the early 1960s.