Archive for Getting Around

New York City: Car or public transit?

Andrew D. Smith | April 21, 2011 | No comments

Every guide book warns visitors against using cars for a trip to New York City, and this advice is absolutely correct — if you’re staying in the city several days.

But if you’re taking a day trip into the city, conventional wisdom is dead wrong. The train is not the way to go. The car is a much better option, both for price and convenience, particularly for groups of three or more.

Many folks who day trip into the city always take the train because they expect horrible traffic getting into the city and dangerous conditions once they get there. But these fears are overblown. If you’re not driving at rush hour, when waits can be truly terrible, you probably won’t experience all that much traffic.

The real waits come from public transit. First, you have to drive to the station and park and allow some extra time on the platform. Then, you have to wait at every station on the way in. Then you have to spend another half hour getting from the train station in New York to wherever you want to go. (When you’re in your car, you drive right to the correct neighborhood, and you leave whenever you’re ready to go.)

Still doubt that driving is really faster? Go to the “Directions” function on Google Maps and ask it to calculate trip times for driving and public transit. Then add in the time you’ll need to get from your house to the station. You’ll be amazed at how much slower transit is.

But what about cost, particularly the high cost of parking?

So long as you’re not going to Midtown or Downtown on a weekday, it’s actually pretty easy to find on-street parking in much of Manhattan. Some of it requires that you feed a meter, but a shocking amount of it is free. Even if you end up parking at a garage, the $30 you spend may well be less than the money that you spend on parking at the train station and tickets. (It will certainly be less for a family of four.)

There are even websites that help you find free parking and get good rates on garage parking.

So go ahead and take the car. The public transit advocates overstate their case.

 

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What’s the fastest way to cross Manhattan? By foot.

Andrew D. Smith | April 11, 2011 | No comments

News that a man was able to beat a New York City bus across town by riding a tricycle designed for toddlers got me wondering about the fastest way to get across the island.

Background for folks who’ve never experienced New York traffic: Getting up and down the island is generally pretty easy. The North-South avenues get much longer green lights than the East-West streets and the lights are synched to maximize traffic flow on those avenues. Getting across town is agonizing. Not only are the lights against you, but the streets narrow streets are often blocked or otherwise at a standstill.

This is why you should always schedule your days in New York with activities that are North and South of one another, not East and West.

How to cope?

Their are virtually no East-West subway lines, so they’re out. The buses are laughably slow, so they’re out too. It basically comes down to cab or foot.

An unscientific self experiment consisting of three mile long trips in Midtown and Greenwich Village suggests that if you’re fit enough to walk at a brisk clip, you’ll almost always do better on foot than you will in a cab — sometimes much better.

It’s not that you can actually walk faster than the cab can drive — except when traffic is terrible — it’s that you can always begin your walk instantly but often have to spend a few minutes finding a cab. Also, because of the one-way streets, the cab often has to travel much further than the walker.

In other words, if you can find a cab instantly, you should hail it. If not, you should walk.

It seems like there should be a better way to get around in the 21st century, but there’s not.

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Finding a seat on a crowded subway

Andrew D. Smith | January 20, 2011 | 2 comments

Finding a seat on New York subways is easy at most points in the day, but it can be tricky during rush hours.

Time Out New York tells you how to ride the subway like a pro:

Know the flow of ridership patterns and locations. Benjamin Kabak is the blogger behind Second Avenue Sagas, which has tracked the progress of the Second Avenue subway and other transit news since 2006. He explains that because of the way entrances are staggered, back cars are less full. To get a seat, try to board at a major transfer point, where people tend to exit en masse. David Holland, who runs Transit Blogger, recommends looking for wear and tear on the edges of platforms, near the tracks—this allows you to guess where the doors will open, so you can swoop in quickly and grab a seat. “There are certain spots that will stand out, because [the doors on] each train open in practically the same spot every time,” he explains. “The repeated foot traffic will eventually leave marks.”

Kabak has some follow-up advice at Second Avenue Sagas:

Take, for instance, the IND stations built after the IRT and BMT systems. The IND stations are three-block behemoths that make room for long cars with lots of room, but a design quirk means that trains fill up at the ends and not in the middle.

Those letters won’t mean anything to you if you’re not a subway geek, so allow me to translate. The IND lines, which were built by the city in the 1930s to compete with the private IRT and BMT subway systems, correspond to today’s A, B, C, D, E, F and G trains.

Taken together, these two posts give you a good start toward getting a seat, though they’re far from definitive. Each train has its own load patterns, which you can see if you stand at the back of platforms and watch all the cars roll by.

Some are simple: crowded in the middle but not on the ends. Others are amazingly complex: odd-numbered cars mobbed but even-numbered cars almost empty. Some trains have different seating patterns at different times of day.

If there’s a definitive pattern to crowding that can be memorized and exploited, I have yet to read it. Perhaps someone will devise a smart phone app that tells you the best place to stand in any station, at any hour, to get a seat.

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Expect another New York taxi fare hike

Andrew D. Smith | November 18, 2010 | No comments

The garages that lease taxis to medallion owners want to raise the amount they can charge for a 12-hour shift, so they’ve asked the Taxi and Limousine Commission to raise the rates that taxis charge passengers. Currently, cabs cost $2.50 for the first fifth of a mile and 40 cents for each subsequent fifth of a mile, plus tolls and $24 an hour for sitting in traffic. The garages want to boost the initial charge to $3 for the first sixth of a mile and 40 cents for each sixth of a mile thereafter.

Will it pass? Almost certainly. Officially, the TLC balances the interests of passengers, drivers, the people who own the 13,000 taxi permits — called medallions — and the garages that own and maintain the physical vehicles. In reality, the TLC uses its regulatory powers, almost overtly, to maximize profits for medallion and garage owners at the expense of passengers and cab drivers. A history of NYC taxis on the city’s own Web site makes it very clear that the system was designed to benefit the taxi industry at the expense of consumers.

Yes, if you clicked through, you did read that right. Back when taxi numbers were unlimited and cabs were unregulated, competition among cabs was pushing prices down and improving life for the city’s 7 million people. So the people who drove the cabs lobbied for regulations that would limit cab numbers and legislate far higher prices so cab owners could make far more money and work far fewer hours while everyone else in New York suffered. That is the entire point of the system, and the city freely admits this because there’s nothing you can do about it.

Actually, it’s probably not possible that the TLC can possibly work any other way. Why? Because folks on the TLC, like everyone else on earth, work to serve their own interests, and that means serving garages and medallion owners.

If the TLC acts against the interests of medallion owners and garages, those people will unanimously use their votes and their massive wallets to punish their enemies on the TLC. If, on the other hand, the TLC acts against the interests of taxi riders, those people will be mad, but they won’t ever do anything about it. Have you ever heard of someone outside the taxi industry ever voting or spending money to change taxi policy? Of course not.

The taxi drivers are even more powerless. Have you ever wondered why they’re almost all poor foreigners? Medallion owners intentionally hire poor foreigners because they cannot vote and they don’t have the money to lobby. Cabbies can do nothing when the TLC ignores their interests except appeal to the public, which doesn’t often change TLC votes.

There’s simply no incentive to help taxi riders or drivers and every incentive to help garage and medallion owners, which is why taxi medallions sell for more than $700.000 apiece.

BTW, taxi riders would doubtless benefit from true competition but things could be even worse. In countries where cabbies are citizens who can vote and organize for political action, cab fares are far higher.

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New York’s sidewalk vendors now sell cars

Andrew D. Smith | November 13, 2010 | One comment

It’s not quite as odd as the holistic dentist — because nothing is as odd as the holistic dentist — but as I was walking near the main library branch in Midtown last weekend, a representative of General Motors was shouting at pedestrians, asking them if they wanted to test drive a Chevy Volt.

Presumably, anyone who accepted the offer had to produce a valid driver’s license before setting off in one of the test models, but I was still surprised GM would take such a risk. Plenty of New Yorkers have licenses for identification purposes but virtually never drive, particularly in Manhattan. I’m sure the vast majority of them learned to drive at some point and drove regularly for years, but far fewer than half the people who live on the island own cars, so they’re all pretty rusty. Not the sort of folks I’d choose to drive a brand new vehicle that costs more than $40,000, particularly given that Manhattan is one of this country’s more challenging driving environments.

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Navigating New York: Check the street name on both sides

Andrew D. Smith | October 31, 2010 | No comments

Say you’re walking up west side of lower Broadway, planning to turn right on Maiden Lane. If you only look at the signs on your side of the street, you’re going to walk a long way — all the way to Montreal — and you still won’t find Maiden Lane.

It’s there all right, but only on the east side of Broadway. On the west side of Broadway it’s called Cortland Street.

It’s all one street, of course, but the city calls it by two names and confuses the hell out of tourists and residents alike.

Isolated case? No. Vesey Street becomes Ann Street when it crosses Broaday. John Street becomes Dey Street. Broad Street becomes Nassau Street when it crosses Wall Street. Trinity Place becomes Church Street at Liberty Street. Kenmare Street becomes Delancy.

Streets change names fairly often below Houston Street, so always look at the street signs on both sides of a light.

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Great NY Subway photos

Andrew D. Smith | October 30, 2010 | No comments

The New York Times has a brilliant slideshow of subway photos as part of a very entertaining series of articles that commemorate the subway’s 106th anniversary. Why do the big blowout at 106 rather than 100 or 110? I have no idea, but there are many good stories.

The story about subway preachers is funny. The story about cops using three-wheeled scooters in the subway, however, neglects to answer just about every obvious question, like how on earth those things are practical for use inside structures that are defined by having many stairs.

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Navigating New York City: Changing Street Names

Andrew D. Smith | October 27, 2010 | No comments

People say the grid makes New York easy for strangers to get around, but the grid’s famous conventions for numbering the avenues hold little sway above 59th Street. There, most of the numbered avenues get names, and you just have to remember which is which.

Eighth Ave. becomes Central Park West.
Ninth Ave. becomes Columbus Ave.
Tenth Ave. becomes Amsterdam Ave.
Eleventh Ave. becomes West End Ave.
Twelfth Ave. becomes Rt. 9A or the Henry Hudson Parkway, but most people call it the West Side Highway.

To make matters even more complex, Broadway stops running diagonally after it gets north of 72nd Street and starts running straight north and south, between Amsterdam and West End, until it hits W. 110 Street, where it merges with West End and West End disappears.

Also, Riverside drive appears between West End and the West Side Highway at 72nd Street.

Got that? Good — but there’s more.

Once you get north of the top of Central Park, which is at 110th Street, Eighth Ave/Central Park West changes its name again to Fredrick Douglas Boulevard.
Seventh Ave. becomes Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.
Sixth Avenue becomes Malcolm X Boulevard or Lennox Boulevard. Both names are used, though Lennox is more common.
Plus, several additional avenues pop up from nowhere: St. Nicholas Ave., Manhattan Ave., Morningside Ave.

It is, in other words, nearly as confusing as any other city, so bring a map if you’re going north of 59th Street, which is also known as Central Park South.

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Track New York buses online

Andrew D. Smith | October 21, 2010 | No comments

Many vistiors use the subways when the come to New York. Few use the buses, which seem confusing and unreliable.

Mapping programs from Google and other companies have begun addressing the complexity. Just type in where you are and where you want to go and you’ll see what bus to take. But you’ll still have no idea when the bus will arrive and whether it would be faster to use an alternate route.

Why? Because buses don’t actually adhere to any fixed schedule and it has always been impossible to know when one is coming — impossible until now.

An MTA pilot program called Bus Time uses on-bus GPS to let you go online and check service on the M16 and M34 routes.

Granted, GPS on two routes does not magically make the bus system accessible — though it’s handy if you have a Metro Card and want to cross 34th Street — but check back in a year and you might find a good percentage of the bus system more accessible.

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Budget more for travel: Subway prices are rising again

Andrew D. Smith | October 15, 2010 | No comments

One of the few reasonably cheap parts of visiting New York City has always been the transportation — so long as you’re willing to ride the subways. But costs are increasing. The MTA, which runs public transportation in the city, has just approved its third rate hike in three years.

Over that period, the cost of a seven-day card allowing one individual unlimited rides on subways and buses has risen 20 percent from $24 to $29 — probably not enough to bankrupt anyone but an annoyance nonetheless.

If it’s any conciliation, residents have it even worse. The price of a 30-day card with unlimited rides has risen nearly 40 percent, from $76 to $104, despite the utter lack of inflation over the past three years.

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