NJ Transit won't take you to Queens. But Jim Venturi will.

It all seemed so simple in my head. I would take Jim Venturi, who is a very smart guy, on a trip that was very dumb. I would do this as an act of kindness, to help Venturi make the point he’s been trying to make for the last three years: The train network we have in New Jersey and New York stinks. And with a few billion dollars here and a few billion dollars there, it could be so much better.

“You don’t need to do much” to make the whole thing function better, said Venturi, 46. “Rather than rethink the entire system of public transit in New Jersey, working with what already exists seems intelligent.”

Precisely. And so, in the spirit of using our existing transit system to the fullest, I planned a quixotic journey in minute detail. Venturi and I would meet at 8 a.m. at Six Brothers Diner in Little Falls for breakfast and coffee. From there we would walk to NJ Transit’s Montclair State University station and hop a train to Hoboken, a ferry to Manhattan, Citi Bikes across Midtown, the tram to Roosevelt Island, a subway train to Queens, and then the Q102 bus to the Quijote Tapas Bar, in Astoria, for lunch. From there we would catch a Lyft ride to La Guardia Airport, the Q18 bus to the Woodside train station, and a Long Island Rail Road train to Port Washington, New York. Finally, we would walk to Louie’s Oyster Bar, on the shore of Long Island Sound, for a dinner of oysters and champagne.

What an awful trip! What a terrible notion! Ah, but here lay my secret genius. You probably don’t realize this, but it is possible to travel from Little Falls, New Jersey, to Port Washington, on Long Island, on a single train. The tracks already exist, and so do the tunnels.

But you are not allowed to make this trip because NJ Transit, Amtrak and the MTA, who own the tunnels and the trains, won’t let you.

Fine, you say. Who needs Louie’s anyway? We have all the oysters we want right here in New Jersey. But did you know that the train to Port Washington travels through Long Island City, Queens, which is positively bursting with new high-rise buildings filled with new, high-paying jobs? And that if you live in New Jersey you shouldn’t bother even applying for those jobs because getting to Long Island City by train, bus or car, reliably and on time, is simply impossible?

“It cuts New Jersey workers off from economic growth in Queens,” Venturi said. “We see no reason to continue that.”

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Venturi wants to advance a plan of his own, and his plan is bigger and smarter than mine. Which is how he found himself sitting in a booth inside Six Brothers Diner at 8 a.m. on a recent Wednesday. Over his bowl of oatmeal, he homed right in on what he sees as the heart of the problem: Penn South, an $8 billion terminal that Amtrak hopes to build across the street from Penn Station.

Why, Venturi asks, should we spend so much on a terminal — where most New Jersey commuters don’t work and don’t want to go — when a few small tweaks could carry us to jobs in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx for the same money?

“Penn Station South is an awful idea,” he said. “And it exists because no one was charged with thinking how we should operate Penn Station and tie that to the economic needs of the region.”

Actually, lots of smart people spend their time thinking about the region’s economic needs. And some of them support Penn South. One of them is Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association, who agrees with Venturi that NJ Transit’s trains ought to carry commuters straight to Queens without forcing them to change trains at Penn Station.

Wright has two problems with Venturi’s quest. One is about substance. Without building more tracks at Penn South, Wright said, how can we maintain enough train service to avoid crippling delays during the decade it will take to rebuild the existing Penn Station?

The second is a matter of style. When Venturi talks about his ideas, he can seem arrogant and inflexible, impatient with anyone who disagrees. But nobody, not even Robert Moses, the famous “master builder” of New York, ever managed to build anything that conforms precisely to his original plan.

“I like Jim. I respect him, and I really value his contributions as someone who is thinking big,” Wright said. “But success will never happen exactly as he’s proposed it. Whether it happens with a new tunnel at 34th Street or a new station at Sunnyside, it’s all success. I’ve had this conversation with Jim, and I’m not sure he totally gets this.”

Sitting in the booth at Six Brothers, it was apparent that Venturi still does not like the idea of compromise.

“It’s insane,” he said of Penn South.

All day long, Venturi stuck hard to his plan, even as mine slowly fell apart. After breakfast we walked to the NJ Transit station up Clove Road, which is partially closed due to construction nearby on Route 46. We were forced to walk in the street, where several cars drove within inches of mowing us down.

Additional adaptations were required. At Hoboken we missed the last ferry to Midtown. So we boarded a boat to lower Manhattan, turning our short Citi Bike ride across Manhattan into a 7-mile tour. After we rode the bright-red tram to Roosevelt Island, Venturi suggested a detour to see the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial. Next we proceeded to the F train as planned, but an error on my part caused us to exit the subway one station too early, forcing us to catch a ride from Lyft to Quijote Tapas Bar.

It was closed.

From there Venturi suggested we skip the bus to La Guardia, and instead take a walking tour of Sunnyside Yard. In his plan, which he calls ReThink NYC, this is where he envisions building a train station more grand than Grand Central, with access to seven subway lines, NJ Transit, Amtrak, Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road.

“Unfortunately, the present proposals out there don’t do that, because their focus is more myopic, rather than thinking more broadly,” he said as he stood at the edge of the yard.

By now it was nearing 5 p.m., and we were tired. We jumped on the Q32 bus to Woodside and caught a train to Great Neck and another to Port Washington.

By the time we arrived, the sun was starting to drop over the water. The waterfront deck at Louie’s was crammed with happy-hour drinkers, however. Also, it was mentioned, Venturi is allergic to oysters.

With these bits of news, our triumphant dinner of shellfish by the water downgraded to tiny bottles of Prosecco Brut sparkling wine, slurped in the dark shadows of Louie’s bar.

Still, we had made it. And we had proved a point. In our collective imagination, Six Brothers Diner and Louie’s Oyster Bar occupy opposite sides of the moon. Yet they sit just 40 miles from each other, along a single thread of train track. Between them we managed to take the most circuitous route possible, riding for 10 hours across nine different modes of transportation. And still we experienced no lines, no mechanical problems, and no delays beside those of our own making.

All it took was a little patience. And many little compromises along the way.

“Isn’t New York City wonderful?” Venturi said as he sipped his sparkling wine. “We talk all the time about how terrible our transit system is. But actually it’s quite robust. It’s exciting.”