The New York subway system

The BBQ Pit
1

Just returned from a 48 hour jaunt to The Big Apple and, as with every trip, I’m reminded of how much I hate the subway system.

Don’t get me wrong: It moves millions of people around, very economically.

But there are aspects of it that are stupidly wrong for no good reason.

What route does that train follow? Just check the map. Oh wait, there’s about a 5% chance that there’s a map anywhere within sight (by comparison, the DC metro has signs on every single car, usually in several places, as well as numerous ones in the stations).

Where’s your platform? The sign tells you where to go? Um, sort of. Sometimes it lies. Then you go down some stairs, and it tells you to go up some more stairs ahead. Then the next sign says to go down some more stairs. Then the next sign says to go up some more stairs. Then you find the damn thing isn’t running from that station.

By the time you find the train (or where it would have been if it weren’t out of service), you’ve walked halfway to your destination.

OK, the insane topology of the system is an artifact of how it grew and can’t be fixed. Some signs showing the stations’ general layouts could go a long way to solving that. The lack of signs and maps: completely inexcusable.

Clearer signs showing where you really need to go to get to your train would be cheap and effective and save a hell of a lot of frustration.

Signs that say what trains go where would be cheap and effective too. In all seriousness, I saw one car that had such a sign, and maybe 2 stations that had them anywhere useful.

Does this station harbor a train that goes where you want? Well yeah, but you go down those stairs and you’re confronted with another route,

The occasional elevator would make it a lot better for people with impaired mobility - the NYC subway system is in no way shape or form an accessible one. 3 years ago, when knee problems made every step painful and stairs were an exercise in mind over body, I followed signs for an elevator at Times Square. I walked 3-4 blocks underground, following signs for that elevator. I never found it. Stations with escalators are practically unheard-of - I saw perhaps 3 of them this trip.

People love to bitch and moan about the DC subway system. Escalators are out of service (shit, at least we have them). Train routes out of service on the weekend? Yes, but there are ways around that including Metro-provided buses. And you don’t need a ball of string to find your way through the system.

2

I haven’t experienced any of that which you mentioned, but I’d like to add that their auto-ticket sellers are pieces of crap that sometimes and sometimes won’t feel like recognizing money and/or tickets. I once missed a train because I couldn’t get the darn thing to sell me a ticket for five minutes. (Same thing for its partners in crime adjacent to it.)

3

I’m waiting for the first New Yorker to check in with “If you live here, you know what trains go where. If you don’t live here, ta hell wit ya!”

4

New York’s subway system is insane, I agree,. And I grew up with it. There are areas with ridiculous overcoverage and there are areas with virtually no coverage. There are three different companies – IRT, BNMT, and IND, that often duplicate routes, causing this confusion. Yet all were actually owned and directed by the City, so there’s no reason for this redundancy. Worse, cars from one line would not fit in tunnels from another line, so they couldn’t interchange resources. Maybe some of thi has been fixed in recent years, but I doubt it.
The New York City subway is easily the dirtiest and noisiest I’ve ever used. When I first encountered the Montreal subway I was astounded – clean and quiet! Every other subway I’ve been in since has been better than New York’s.
But, it does get you where you want (unlike the defunct Rochester Subway, that didn’t go where anyone wanted), and it doesn’t shut down at 1 in the morning, like Boston’s. I still take it practically every time I’m in the city. But sometimes I shut my ears.

5

Oh, come on, signs and maps? That means people from elsewhere would be stopping to look at them! We don’t want any tramplings!

But yes, it can be disorienting and it’s not just riding, it’s also just getting in and out. I know when I have to get off at 34th/Herald Sq. – it has like at least a half dozen possible exits to the street – I consistently end up coming up at least one corner away from where I intended to and facing some other direction.

6

Yyyyyup. I’ve ridden subways in DC, London, Paris, Moscow, and Copenhagen also. New York’s is by far the worst experience.

My favorite, funnily, was Moscow’s. The huge ornate stations and the way people lovingly shove you deeper into the car…

7

We just got back from a trip to NY, and we had the same problem with the ticket machines rejecting a perfectly good credit card.
And we managed to get where we were going, but I did wonder how the hell we could have done it without the internet. I didn’t see any maps except the one inside the train.

8

Never ridden on a subway car (well, not since the early 1960s) that did not have at least two complete subway maps in plain sight.

9

NYC’s system has 468 stations. Compare to DC’s 86 stations - yes New yorks system is five times larger - theres no such thing as a small job in the NYC subway. Elevators are certainly needed as well as other accessibility features (such as telecoil transmitters) and they are being added over time. My home station, 71st-Continental in Queens, is being renovated to add elevators right now. This involves closing the street and half the station entrances for more than a year. digging through the layers of NYC’s underground infrastructure without fucking it up is a huge task.

However there are a minimum of 2 maps in every car. New Yorkers are also very helpful with directions.

What’s funny is I find DC’s Metro signage totally incomprehensible.

10

There are two maps in every car of the NYC subway. There is a map somewhere near the token booth. (if there is one0

There are a few stations that are like this. A rabbit warren of tunnels and connections.
The vast majority are not.

The service is done mostly on the weekends.

The signs are there. And there actually pretty clear.

Yes there are not enough elevators. They are adding them. And the ones they add are sometimes out of service. I personally was trapped in an elevator for over an hour. A really new one in the Times Square station.
But don’t you dare compare NYC Subway to the DC Metro.

Miles of track? Customers per day? Number of stations? NYC has more of those than DC. More of those than Boston, or Chicago, or Bart or actually, you combine all the other American subway systems and NYC has more of those things.
The DC Metro is just plain creepy. Station design was done in the “dystopian future style”
Of course the real pisser is that they want to charge a dollar for the metro card.

11

For under five bucks you can go from Rockaway to the Bronx. That’s pretty freaking cool. If you really want to see bad signage try leaving NYC and heading in NJ. As a transplanted New Yorker, I think the signs are terrible in this state.

12

When I hear stuff like this I honestly have to wonder how hard people actually tried. Every platform has a map. Every subway car has two maps. You might actually have to move to find it, but it’s there.

The NYC subway can be pretty confusing (it’s the most complex subway system in the world and one of the largest) but the idea that it is not well-signed is not grounded in reality. There are signs everywhere, but it takes some time to learn how to read them. Like any large public facility, there is an iconography and lexicon that takes some getting used to, but it’s all very logical and systematic once you learn it.

(There are certain situations where you’ll be directed up stairs and then down others; those suck. It’s an artifact of how there were three competing systems and things have been connected in weird ways. Or sometimes it’s just stupidness.)

Yes, a lot of stations are not accessible. That’s because they were built 100 years ago. Newer stations and those that have been overhauled have plenty of elevators. You do have to look for them. There are signs.

Here’s the Secret: New Yorkers like to show off. Ask anybody within earshot how to get anywhere, and you’ll have a mob of people jockeying to give you the best directions possible, in any language on earth, and maybe even Klingon.

Only the IND was owned by the city initially; the IRT and BMT were private concerns until they were forced into bankruptcy and acquired by the government in the 1940s. During the Dual Contracts period from 1910-1930 the city gave the IRT and BMT exclusive franchises to expand certain lines, which is why the biggest redundancies are seen in the oldest parts of the system (like lower Manhattan.)

13

Under five bucks? 2.25 and a free bus transfer. I recently learned DC doesn’t offer any free bus transfers unless you buy Smarttrip which cost $10!!??. Weak sauce.

14

Heh, I agree about DC’s stations. How do people see down there? It’s so dark and depressing. But the DC metro works pretty well.

I just got back from Montreal a few weeks ago and I love their system. Excellent, consistent station design, good signage system, and they open the train doors before the things even stop. :eek:

Both DC and Montreal systems have the benefit of being built a lot more recently. There’s a lot of historical baggage in the NYC system in addition to its insane complexity.

15

There’s an app for that.

16

Has anybody mentioned yet that each subway car has two maps?

Besides, the NY subway smells great, people-watching is fun (unless they catch you doing it) and the food is terrific.*

*When I took the trains regularly in high school, there was a place in the 42d St. station that sold day-old pastry (Napoleons were my favorite). I lived to tell about it.
**There were also ancient EE trains on the BMT that had fiber seats and low-wattage light bulbs for illumination. It was like going back in time to 1900.

17

Same here. All cars have maps. Stations have maps next to the booth. You can also download a map to your phone or use the trip planner app on your phone.

If you don’t know which station exit to use to get you on the correct corner, use the compass on your phone or orientate yourself from the direction of your train and whether or not their is another platform.

18

Not that there isn’t much to bitch about. The byzantine stations can drive you insane. The one I hate in particular is Fulton Street, which is monstrously complex, with staircases and signs everywhichaway, and is due to be replaced in mid-2014. My question is: since the station was partly destroyed as a result of 9/11, why on earth does it take thirteen years to reconstruct a friggen subway station? Yeah, it’s a big one ,with plenty of subway lines running through, but you built the friggen Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge in half the time, combined. Jesus Christ, get off your asses and put up a few goddamned subway tunnerls, why don’t you?

19

Like everyone else has said, there are multiple maps in every car and on every platform. If you couldn’t find one, you clearly weren’t looking. They are there.

Some stations are *huge *with tons of winding tunnels, stairs you go up and then back down again to get out, and many street exits (Times Square, Union Square, Herald Square, Columbus Circle, basically any of the major ones along Broadway where multiple lines connect) but most of the stops along a given line are much smaller, with just one or two street exits.

There do need to be more elevators, yes.

If you ever need directions in the subway, just ask the nearest person. Almost always they will be perfectly happy to tell you how to get where you are going.

But hey, our subway runs 24/7 and it only costs $2.50 per ride no matter how far you are going. You can ride the entire system for hours and go anywhere and never pay more than the original fare. I’ll take that over London’s system any day.
(I thought this pit was going to be about that idiot last night who tried to walk across the subway tracks and got killed by an uptown 2 train, shutting down service to the Upper West Side for several hours.)

20

I’m also a little confused by the OP and wonder if they expected a guide to show them around.

Like others have said, there are a multitude of subway maps all over the place. In every car there is at least one map and most of the time two. In the stations, there is one next to the booth (or where the booth used to be in the stations they were removed from). There are usually 2 or 3 maps on the platforms themselves (on the walls behind the tracks). In the larger stations (Time Square, 34th Street, Union Square) there are usually 5 maps scattered throughout the station in addition to the ones near the booth and on the platforms. On the trains themselves, they usually will have a route map (specific for the train you are on) with every stop along that line and lights indicating which stops the current train you are on will be making. Sometimes these don’t work, especially if the train is running on a different track than it would normally, but for the most part they’re pretty good.

As far as navigating the tunnels themselves, yes, sometimes you will have to walk to make a connection (grand central station is one of the worst with regards to this) but it means you’re walking underground, which is great when the weather is shitty, you avoid waiting to cross streets, and if you know what train you connecting to, you just follow the signs which have both the colored circles and the letter/number of the trains.

Maintenance has always been an issue but they’ve implemented some programs recently which has helped immensely. As one person already said, a lot of work is done on the weekends and at night. They’ve started the “Fast Track” program which takes a line out of service for 5 weekday nights (I believe 11pm - 5am) to get the work done during non-peak hours. When there are service changes, they have posters when you enter the station and along the poles by the tracks indicating that this train is running on this track (although it will usually make its normal stops, you just get on upstairs instead of downstairs). They are also installing LED signs on the tracks which tell you how long before the next train arrives, indicating both the letter/number of the train and also which track it will be arriving on using an arrow (up, down, left, right).

The elevators/escalators can be an issue, especially for some of the lower volume stations but they have been improving and installing them over the past few years. And I will agree that the stations can be kind of dirty, altough anyone who rode the subways in the 80s and early 90s can tell you that they were 100x worse back then.

If you want to complain about the subways, there are plenty of valid complaints you can make. The trains are usually packed during rushhour. In the morning, I walk 40 blocks to work because there are some days that I have to wait for 3 or 4 trains to pull into the station before there is one I can sardine-can myself into.

The keep raising the fares to fund various projects and initiatives but the overall service level remains the same. They got rid of most of the booth attendants and surprise surprise, minor thefts have increased in those stations and they now need to post police instead (which I can only assume is more expensive than the barely minimum-wage booth attendants).

I can go on but I think the point is clear - there is signage galore in the stations. It makes me wonder if the OP was walking around staring at the ground.

Oh and one more thing - all the people who said NY’ers love to help and give directions - that’s definitely true. Ask anyone on the street or in the stations and they will most likely give you 5 different ways to get whereever it is you’re trying to go.