Q about the M.T.A.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t live in NY and I’ve never visited there.

But I have been to London. I used the Tube exclusively there. I just didn’t seem to make any sense to take a bus anywhere the tube went. Maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do (for one thing, I missed a TON of the city I could have been seeing from a bus…and I never had a sense of how the city is put together because it was like being in a teleporter.) But…the Tube just seemed like it would logically be faster.

Anyway, sightseeing aside, why, in Manhattan for example, would someone take either a bus or the subway? What are the best uses of each?

I hope my question makes sense…

2

For the most part, MTA buses are pretty awful, in that they are the world’s slowest buses. I believe they average about 5 MPH. That said, the subways mainly run uptown/downtown (that is, north/south). If you want to go cross-town (that is, east-west), sometimes it would be a long ways on the subway, but you can take a bus that goes right where you want it to. Be prepared to wait, however, especially when traffic’s heavy.

3

It like that in many cities: it’s much much cheaper to add a bus line than a subway line, so the bus lines to go where subways cannot.