After a Sunday picnic at Central Park in Manhattan, I took the Coach USA bus line 100 back to Princeton. I kept notes on the actual times vs. times in the timetable:
| Location | Timetable | Actual time |
| leave from bus terminal | 20:00 | 20:14 |
| out of Lincoln tunnel | 20:21 | |
| start of toll roal | 20:26 | |
| end of toll road | 20:54 | |
| New Brunswick, Neilson Plaza | 20:40 | 20:57 |
| New Brunswick downtown, train station | 20:50 | 21:07 |
| Kingston | 21:20 | 21:55 |
| Princeton, Palmer Square | 21:30 | 22:05 (estimate) |
This was a Sunday evening (May 3rd, 2015). There was no heavy traffic. I mean, the streets were not empty, but in no place was the bus stuck in traffic, and the traffic flowed smoothly.
If you are going to New Brunswick, the bus can be competitive. The bus drives on the New Jersey Turnpike toll road almost the whole way, and doesn’t stop even once before Neilson Plaza. A NJ Transit train from New York Penn Station no New Brunswick is, according to timetables, 53 to 60 minutes, and the train stops at 10 stations in between, while the bus stops at none. The bus could be very competitive, if it didn’t leave 14 minutes late.
But after New Brunswick, the train goes only 15-20 minutes to Princeton Junction, and then about 10 more minutes to take the Dinky from Princeton Junction to Princeton. (And then, about 10 minutes walk, if you want to go to Palmer Square, where the bus stops.) But the bus takes almost an hour from New Brunswick to Princeton.
Then again, the trains don’t always run on time, either.
