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Where the New York City Subway Doesn't Go
- mosburger 11y agoThe lack of subway access to LGA is what I, an occasional traveler to NYC, find the most mind-boggling.
- history3 11y agoThere's a pretty decent bus, it costs $2.75, and if you can spare a an extra ~30m travel time, it's worth it. http://web.mta.info/nyct/service/NewQ70LimitedStopService_brochure.htm http://web.mta.info/nyct/service/NewQ70LimitedStopService_br...
- ascagnel_ 11y agoIs there one-seat service to any of the three major area airports from midtown Manhattan? There's an NJT stop for EWR, but it requires a transfer to AirTrain (the internal EWR rail system).
- steveklabnik 11y agoYou can take the M to Jackson Hts - Roosevelt Av, and then there's a Q70 shuttle from there. It's not too bad. I still prefer JFK.
- wjnc 11y agoWalk people, walk! Why only 500m, it's only a 6 minute walk! Not including traffic, so might be some more. Increase that radius to a 10 minute walk on one end and a there is a lot more coverage (pi x r2). And you're hitting your daily movement lower limit of 30 minutes. Or am I really thinking outside the US box?
- FlannelPancake 11y agoWalking sucks in the winter. It's never ridiculously cold (certainly not midwest or Canada cold), but windchill is frequent and kinda nasty if you have literally any skin exposed. Especially in the outer boroughs (not so much in Manhattan), snow doesn't get cleaned up very quickly either. Walking can definitely be a bit of an obstacle course - ice, snow banks blocking the sidewalk, etc. Anyway blah blah blah first world problems, just my perspective on it.
- acveilleux 11y agoAs a canadian, I find that unconvincing. For the last few years up until this July, my commute involved a 900m walk to the nearest subway stop (which I considered nice and short!) year-round. And yes, it took twice as long when there was 8-12" of fresh snow, which happened ib average every other week in winter. City was Montreal.
- FlannelPancake 11y ago> And yes, it took twice as long Yeah, that sucks. If it takes you 12 minutes normally to walk 1 km (assuming 5 km/h, which is a normal walking speed), now it takes you 24 minutes to and from the station in the winter. So you're spending 45 minutes a day just walking to and from the station. If the rest of your commute is 30 minutes (train + walking to work from train), you're commuting for nearly two hours (1:48) every day vs. 1:24 during the summer. That's assuming you don't also walk slower from the train station to work, which would make it even more of a timesink. If you lived right near the station, it would be 60 minutes every day, winter or summer. I mean yeah, it's only an extra 30-60 minutes a day (and your point was really only about winter so we'll be fair and say 30 minutes a day), but shit, I'm not going to turn my nose up at that. I'd definitely pay a small premium to get that time back every single weekday.
- acveilleux 11y agoIn Montreal, I can count on the sidewalks being cleared well enough within 48 hours of a big storm and sort of cleared within 8h (< 2" snow, at least 16-20" wide path, basically one pass of the sidewalk plows.)
- FlannelPancake 11y agoAs I mentioned above, that's definitely not the case in the outer boroughs of New York (Manhattan in some cases too, depending on where you are, though I don't know that for certain). There have been weeks at a time where I've had to walk in the street because the sidewalks were just inaccessible or sheets of ice, which makes proximity to the train station all the more important.
- jawngee 11y agoNew Yorkers walk more than any other city I've lived in. In fact, about a year after I moved out of NYC to Saigon I gained quite a few extra pounds because I wasn't walking nearly the same amount. Which used to be about 5-6 miles a day in NYC on an average day.
- koliber 11y agoThe author is misleading about lack of subway access to JFK airport. I have traveled many times to JFK by subway. He is technically correct that the subway does not tunnel underneath JFK and does not go to terminals. However, you take the A train and then hop onto the AirTrain provided by JFK to get to the terminal.
- bradleyankrom 11y agoYup. Three major lines (BMT Nassau, IND Sixth Ave, IND Eighth Ave) converge in Jamaica, where it's only a few minutes' walk to transfer to the AirTrain to JFK. I've never had a problem getting to/from JFK via train, but LGA is a little tougher (though the increased 125th St. bus service has helped a lot).
- bigredtech 11y agoYou can also take the LIRR from Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn to JFK and it's really easy and convenient.
- steveklabnik 11y agoYeah, they're not counting AirTrain. You can get to it from the J, the E, and the A, actually.
- melling 11y agoIt doesn't go to New Jersey either, but it should. http://m.nydailynews.com/opinion/extend-7-train-secaucus-article-1.1504464 http://m.nydailynews.com/opinion/extend-7-train-secaucus-art...
- codingdave 11y agoDid something happen to the PATH trains? I always used those when work took me to NJ.
- ascagnel_ 11y agoThe PATH trains are still around, but they haven't expanded service in at least a decade. PATH services the two Penn Stations (Newark and NY), but doesn't run to Secaucus. In fact, I think Secaucus is still exclusively NJT when it comes to rail. There was some talk years ago about expanding AirTrain (at EWR) to Secaucus and the Penn Stations (for one-seat rides from midtown Manhattan to the airport), but that hasn't gone anywhere.
- fluxquanta 11y agoPATH was screwed up for years after 9/11.
- bunderbunder 11y agoThe radius of the circle the author used, 500m, is a bit under twice the length of a Manhattan block. I can guarantee you that your typical regular transit user is capable of walking a couple blocks without having to stop for a Gatorade.
- adrianN 11y agoMaybe they're used to SimCity. Sims walk about 400 meters.
- bane 11y agoIt's a useful metric, IIR the Paris Metro is designed so that no point in the city is more than 500m from a station.
- lloyddobbler 11y agoI was thinking this, too. I can't imagine anyone--even those from out of town--thinking that walking 3-4 blocks to a subway station in NYC is too far to handle. Re: another comment, the Paris Metro _is_ dense enough to work in the city proper - but only in the city proper. A side effect is that the service is super-slow except on 1-2 lines. The slow speed makes it nearly impossible to expand to the marginal/suburb areas, so you wind up with a similar situation to New York's outer boroughs.
- harryjo 11y agoNote: 500m is 2 long blocks (Avenues); 6 street blocks.
- Spooky23 11y agoIgnoring the bus lines is pretty wacky. I grew up in Queens, and rode the bus all of the time. My dad took the bus to the express train to manhattan for several years. The bus isn't sexy, but it works and is often less unpleasant than the subway. Also, you need to remember how places like Queens developed. It was mostly little downs until about 100 years ago. The house I grew up in was part of a 120 acre farm as late as 1897! It developed into a sort of inner suburb... And as density increased, the cost of acquiring land and building infrastructure hockey-sticked upward.
- Ollinson 11y agoIt really is wacky. I understand why the author made the omission though. I've been on public bus systems in many major US cities and they are entirely the domain of the elderly, handicapped or impoverished. The NYC bus system though is used by all walks of life, much like the subway itself. In a way I'm glad that the bus system is seen by transplants as less sexy because it keeps the rents in all those neighborhoods not directly serviced by subway lines much cheaper. With Bus Time and a huge fleet [1] of buses, the NYC bus system is often more reliable than the trains. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_local_bus_agencies_by_ridership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_local_bu...
- pdabbadabba 11y agoIt's worth bearing in mind that in areas of NYC where the bus is the only option, a bus commute is often much much longer than a subway commute. I had the displeasure of attempting a few bus commutes into Manhattan from my old neighborhood in Bed-Stuy, and I would not be eager to do it again. So, while I agree that one shouldn't completely ignore the buses, I think it is also misleading to treat them as equivalent to subways.
- reallifepixel 11y agoOn a slight tangent, I would just like to note that the Stamen Design Toner maps are beautiful.
- noer 11y ago500m is a little over a quarter of a mile and can be walked by an average person in just over 6 minutes, if the author extended those radii by 250m to 750, it would be closer to half a mile, which a person can walk in about 10 minutes and, probably represents a more realistic view of how long someone will walk to the subway. That said, I used to live a little over a half mile from the Nassau Av G station. There was a bus that would take me there, but I eventually figured out that unless I saw the bus was a block or two away from my corner, it would just be quicker to walk to the station, rather than wait for the bus.
- michaelpinto 11y agoSomething tech folks may find of interest is that eons before Uber there were private van sharing services in Queens that operated near all of the final subway stops like Jamaica. Also due to the lack of yellow cabs you'd tend to use black car services to fill the taxi void.
- harryjo 11y agoWhy would you make "transit-accessible locatons" the exact same color as "the ocean" ??
- tzs 11y agoWhen considering a potential living arrangement, I pretty much ignore bus access unless I am only planning to live there a relatively short time. That's because its way to easy to fiddle with bus routes, and so I can't count on a bus that works for me now to still work for me next year. I'd expect that with a subway, where moving a route over a few blocks is considerably more involved and more costly than changing some signs and putting out new schedules, there would be more long term stability. Is this the case in reality? How often do they shut down a route in the NY subway system? How often do they keep an underperforming route but cut the frequency of trains? Is there some lower limit for train frequency below which they will not go for a route that is not being outright cancelled?