Just a few hundred feet from the entrance of the underground station, where Brnic arrived every morning from Hoboken, Harborside was a convenient place to work.

These days, Brnic, an accountant who works for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants still takes an NJ Transit train from his home in Rutherford to Hoboken and hops on a PATH train.

But now, he gets out at the Pavonia-Newport station, about a mile north of his office. He then boards a chartered shuttle bus provided by the managers of his office building that takes him to Harborside.

"It's a constant effort to make this connection to that connection to that connection," Brnic said with a sigh, as he stood outside his office building on a sunny morning last week. The new trip to work takes about an hour, maybe 15 minutes longer than it used to.

And although Brnic takes the hassle of train and bus schedules in stride, he is one of thousands whose morning and evening travel patterns -- and methods -- have changed since Sept. 11.

Within hours of the terrorist attacks that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center, officials created "frozen zones," banning cars, stopping trains and closing tunnels and bridges into Manhattan.

Some of those prohibitions were quickly lifted. Others, such as restrictions on driving through the Holland Tunnel, remain. And with the destruction of the PATH station beneath the Trade Center that was used by 65,000 people a day, commuters throughout the region have been re-routed onto different trains, new buses and, increasingly, ferries.

"The principal issue, of course, is the destruction of the World Trade Center station," said Martin E. Robins, director of the Transportation Policy Institute at Rutgers University. "I think we all need to remember the importance of getting that station back."

Although overall ridership on PATH is down -- to 180,000 riders a day from a peak of 260,000 -- with the loss of the busy route between the Trade Center and Exchange Place, smaller stations have been forced to accommodate far more people than they were designed to handle.

The Grove Street station, which is now used by most people working on the Jersey City waterfront who used to ride to Exchange Place, is on average 45 percent more crowded than it was before Sept. 11.

Before the attacks, an average of 12,220 people used the station on weekdays; that number has jumped to 17,669, according to Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the system. During the morning rush hour, lines form the length of the platform with people waiting to exit.

And although the bi-state agency plans to add entrances to the station in hopes of moving people more quickly across the platform, there is little relief in sight for commuters desperate for elbow room.

At Christopher Street in Manhattan, the situation is more dire, with a higher than 100 percent increase in riders. Port Authority officials now close the station to Manhattan-bound commuters in the evenings, citing safety concerns.

"The big problem is that those are very small capacity stations," said Coleman of Grove and Christopher streets. "They were not built for large volumes of people."

A plan to add entrances to Christopher Street was met with fierce opposition from residents and business owners in Manhattan's Greenwich Village earlier this year, and Coleman said the Port Authority has tabled the idea until further studies can be done.

Meanwhile, those PATH riders who once relied on stations at Exchange Place and in Lower Manhattan are finding new and often more time-consuming ways to get to work.

"I originally took the PATH from the Trade Center," said a New York man who works at 10 Exchange, right in front of the shuttered station, and now commutes to Grove Street and walks to work from there. "As you would expect, it takes longer."

Exchange Place, which was unharmed despite some flooding on the tracks after Sept. 11, will reopen as a spur off the 33rd Street line in June, officials have said.

A temporary station at the World Trade Center site is expected to come on line in December 2003.

Until then, PATH commuters to Downtown Jersey City will have to content themselves with either using the closest station, Grove Street, and tolerating the crush or riding the train to Pavonia-Newport.

Once at Newport, commuters can either take the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Transit system or, if they're lucky, one of the private vans that many companies provide for their employees.

While public transportation in Jersey City was certainly disrupted by the attacks, the loss of PATH service into Lower Manhattan has radically changed the ways in which some people commute between New Jersey and New York.

Among the more evident changes is the dramatic rise in the number of people using ferries, most of which are run by the private company NY Waterway.

Ferry service, once seen as a pleasant if eccentric way to cross the river, became the only option for thousands of people when PATH service was knocked out and bridges and tunnels were closed down in the days after the attacks.

Since Sept. 11, daily ridership on NY Waterway ferries has nearly doubled, from 33,000 to 65,000, according to Pat Smith a spokesman for the company.

The fleet, which now includes several boats that were chartered by the company as an emergency measure to accommodate the surge in passengers, is made up of 46 boats, with five more being built. Before Sept. 11, NY Waterway had 24 ferries.

"We saw five or six years worth of growth in about six months," said Arthur Imperatore Jr., president of the family-owned company his father started in 1986. "It was a very trying experience."

The company not only added boats but also new docks in the six days between the attacks and when the New York Stock Exchange reopened on Monday, Sept. 17, Imperatore said.

"We basically had six days to replace the PATH train," he said.

It remains unclear how many of those new riders will stick with maritime travel after a new PATH station opens in Lower Manhattan, but many are getting used to braving the often choppy waters of the Hudson twice a day.

"I like being outside," said Rob Pereless, who waited at the Colgate ferry stop in Downtown Jersey City last week for a boat to Pier 11 in Lower Manhattan. "In the summer it's nice but I can only imagine it on a blustery winter morning, with the water splashing up."

Pereless, who drives from Monmouth County to the light rail station in Liberty State Park and then rides to Exchange Place on the above-ground train before catching the ferry, said the whole process has added time and expense to his commute.

He used to take the train to Newark Penn Station and then the PATH straight to work, at American Express in the World Financial Center.

Once PATH trains start running to Lower Manhattan again, Pereless said he will switch back to a subterranean commute.

Many commuters, who like Pereless used to catch the PATH coming into Newark or Hoboken on NJ Transit commuter trains, now simply stay on all the way to New York, according to Ken Miller, a spokesman for the transit agency.

Ridership on those commuter trains in and out of Hoboken has gone down 18 percent since Sept. 11. At Newark Penn Station, ridership is down 43 percent, while New York Penn Station has seen a surge of more than 15 percent, Miller said.

Light rail, which is operated by NJ Transit, saw its daily ridership spike from 11,000 to 15,000 right after Sept. 11, but it is now back down to 11,000, said Miller.

For several weeks after the attack, NJ Transit allowed riders to go from Pavonia-Newport to Exchange Place on light rail for free but then began collecting the $1.50 fare, riling many commuters, who had only begun riding the system after the attacks and considered the fare too much.

Miller said the drop in passengers may have been partially linked to the fare but he insisted other factors played a more significant role.

"It had more to do with the settling of jobs in the region, with people moving around," Miller said. "There were a lot of shifting commuting patterns."