7 ms·

As a tourist my immediate impression is that the infrastructure is quite old compared to other world cities (why are the subways so hot?) and the touristy areas

by Jack000 10y ago

As a tourist my immediate impression is that the infrastructure is quite old compared to other world cities (why are the subways so hot?) and the touristy areas are a lot dirtier than I would have expected. There are also some NY-isms that I haven't seen in other American cities (terror alert levels, garbage bags piled up on sidewalks, ubiquitous taxies, tourists literally everywhere) I like how it's basically a microcosm of the entire world, and you can reach all of it without a car, but I'm not sure it's worth the inconveniences plus 3x cost of living.

rayiner 10y ago
New York had one of the first subway systems in the world. It's not air conditioned because they didn't have AC at the turn of the 20th century. The street grid was also designed without alleys, hence the trash bags.
- davidf18 10y ago
  Upper West Sider here: Subway cars of course have AC. Older cars sometimes break AC but the newer ones have backup compressors so that doesn't happen. I do think they could at least have some high speed fans in parts of the subway stations, esp. for the elderly who don't tolerate heat as well as others.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    New York City is a great place to be old and either healthy or rich. Otherwise, you run into problems not addressed in the article - such as the tremendous lack of handicapped access in the subways. We lived at 145th on the ABCD line. There's precisely one escalator that takes you from the lowest platform to the mezzanine, skipping the mid-level platform in between. Then there are stairs to get to street-level. There are no elevators. So when my father, in his 70s, came to visit us, he had a hell of a time getting down the stairs. We ended up specifically planning trips so that we would arrive on the lower platform, so we could take the escalator. All the walking does have health benefits, but if you're not capable of it, you better live near some accessible stations, or you end up being reliant on cars and access-a-ride (which, granted, I know nothing about - maybe it's fantastic.) Having typed all that, I'd rather be old and feeble here than, say, in Dallas, where I have to drive, until I'm no longer able to, and then have to rely on others for transportation. I'd gladly take a 20-minute journey down a stairwell that takes others 20 seconds for the freedom it would afford me.
    - awl130 10y ago
      how long until self driving cars in dallas?
      - parasitius 10y ago
        Have you been there? It's not something to look forward to. Every stinkin' place you want to go involves 45 minutes of road travel. Just because you get to zone out all the while doesn't mean your day isn't deprived of an immense amount of time. (To put things in perspective, I'm in Austin where everything, absolutely everything, is within 15 minutes' drive, but it is a "catastrophe" that during peak hours that becomes 35-40. Working at home and driving only off-peak hours has it's perks!)
      - pavel_lishin 10y ago
        Probably awhile. I can't reply to parasitius, because his comment is dead, but it's also nonsense. > Just because you get to zone out all the while doesn't mean your day isn't deprived of an immense amount of time. I'm glad that Austin is working out for him, but we can't shrink all cities, nor should we. 45 minutes of free time is still 45 minutes of free time.
    - schrodinger 10y ago
      It's true that there are a lot of inaccessible subway stations, but at the same time you're much more likely to be able to go about 90% of your life just walking around your neighborhood—restaurants, grocery, doctors, etc, all within a 10 minute walk is pretty standard in Manhattan.
- parasitius 10y ago
  But what's your point? This is an utterly rubbish reason/excuse for America's "great cities" to remain the shame/buttholes of the world forevermore. It is the Christianity + liberalism's worship of the poor that leads to subsidized instead of market-rate (PROFITABLE) subway trips which means no money to fix or improve anything unless the money can be stolen from tax payers (instead of the rational thing --> getting it from the fricking folks who BENEFIT from the subway).... Until we get over the age of altruism, America is doomed.
- nickonline 10y ago
  This is such terrible reasoning, the London tube was opened 40 years before NYC and they used wooden carriages pulled by a steam train. To suggest the reason the subway doesn't have air conditioning is because "It's old" is laughable.
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    The London one only has air conditioning on the shallower lines' trains, since there is enough ventilation for the waste heat to dissipate. New York should be able to do the same. I think London is still working on cooling the deep, "tube" lines, where the clearance between train and tunnel is around 20cm.
    - nickonline 10y ago
      Sure - I guess the point I'm making is that technology has advanced significantly in the time
gcr 10y ago
I disagree. Even though the infrastructure is old, the public transportation in Manhattan is leagues better than most other American cities, considering what you can access. Especially the bay area. Living in the NYC area is also much cheaper even before figuring for car ownership costs.
- JDiculous 10y ago
  Living in NYC isn't cheap, and unlike other cities, the housing quality is old and terrible. For a tiny studio in a shabby 100 year old prewar walkup tenement building in Manhattan, you're looking at a minimum of $2,000/month. Most people pay $1,400+/month to live in old converted apartments (ie. putting up a wall to turn the living room into another bedroom) with roommates, and often the bedrooms are too small to even have room for a desk, and the window faces directly into another building (if there even is a window). In these buildings you're not going to have AC (meaning you need to buy a window AC unit), a dishwasher, trash compactor, elevator, and all the other luxuries we take for granted anywhere else in the modern world. I spent 3 years in one of these buildings, and the apartment was perpetually too hot (even in the winter), and there was nothing I could do because heat in the unit was not controllable. Apparently this is fairly normal in these buildings. If you want to live anywhere nice and somewhat modern that isn't a dump, you're looking at a minimum of $3,000/month for a studio, $4,000/month for a 1BR, etc. And want to buy a place? You're looking at a minimum of $500k for any studio that isn't a total piece of crap, and they're going to want a 20% down payment. And who wants to raise a family in a studio?
  - ics 10y ago
    I live in a 3BR which is currently around $2.5k/month in beautiful Brooklyn just minutes from the A, C, and G trains. Next week I'll hear back as to whether or not I also have a $1k/mo studio with yard in a well-kept brownstone at the belt of Morningside Park. Most of my friends with studios pay around $1.5k to be in either newly renovated units in not-so-hot areas (upper reaches of Harlem for example) or tiny (200 sq ft) and run down units in more hot areas such as the East Village. None of these are rent controlled or stabilized. Your numbers are the worst case– maybe what you should budget for coming from out of town and looking for a first place, but certainly not the norm if you're looking on a budget. A quick search just now shows at least a couple good listings in the $2400-2900 range for 2BR in the East Village. In my opinion the two big takeaways from these discussions are that (1) New York is what you make of it and (2) New York, due in no small part to its transit system, is bigger than just downtown or uptown Manhattan. I've never had the amenities you listed even growing up so it's likely I don't appreciate them in the same way but there's plenty of other things the city offers to make up for it.
GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
> old compared to other world cities "Not being bombed into rubble" probably comes into play here.
santaclaus 10y ago
Oh god, those garbage bags. I remember a few winters ago, our street got clobbered on garbage day and giant piles of old garbage bags sat underneath a layer of snow for about a month. When the feet of snow covering the garbage bags finally started to melt we had a nice little bubbling stream of garbage downhill for a few days...
prawn 10y ago
Have they looked into underground garbage storage? I think in Paris (and likely elsewhere) they have large tanks below street level that are raised when trucks need to pick up the refuse.
- terminado 10y ago
  "They" have not. Even the underground in Manhattan is crowded. Manhattan is basically an island of very hard, solid metamorphic rock. Most of the city is plenty shot through with tunnels and foundations, and underground car garages. You could probably ask the sanitation department why they haven't explored these options: http://www1.nyc.gov/site/dsny/index.page http://www1.nyc.gov/site/dsny/index.page Please report back, if they ever reply to you. Also, "terror alert levels" are not a thing, and really haven't been, since like... 2004? And probably only lasted that long, since 2004 was an election year, for "you know who."
  - Jack000 10y ago
    I saw it at the Staten Island ferry terminal last week, maybe because it's approaching 9/11? It had a yellow insert and said something like alert level 1. That combined with the "see something say something" ads does make me feel like terrorism might a real possibility. For my part I've avoided the subway at peak hours. I know it's pretty unlikely, but who knows.
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
> why are the subways so hot? I believe the biggest cause is the heat from braking the cars all day. There is no regenerative braking in the system and the older trains have crude speed control so they're constantly braking to scrub speed between stops for curves and work zones. It all gets dumped as heat into the tunnels.
anentropic 10y ago
"why are the subways so hot?" welcome to London...

by Jack000 10y ago

rayiner 10y ago

New York had one of the first subway systems in the world. It's not air conditioned because they didn't have AC at the turn of the 20th century. The street grid was also designed without alleys, hence the trash bags.

davidf18 10y ago
Upper West Sider here: Subway cars of course have AC. Older cars sometimes break AC but the newer ones have backup compressors so that doesn't happen. I do think they could at least have some high speed fans in parts of the subway stations, esp. for the elderly who don't tolerate heat as well as others.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  New York City is a great place to be old and either healthy or rich. Otherwise, you run into problems not addressed in the article - such as the tremendous lack of handicapped access in the subways. We lived at 145th on the ABCD line. There's precisely one escalator that takes you from the lowest platform to the mezzanine, skipping the mid-level platform in between. Then there are stairs to get to street-level. There are no elevators. So when my father, in his 70s, came to visit us, he had a hell of a time getting down the stairs. We ended up specifically planning trips so that we would arrive on the lower platform, so we could take the escalator. All the walking does have health benefits, but if you're not capable of it, you better live near some accessible stations, or you end up being reliant on cars and access-a-ride (which, granted, I know nothing about - maybe it's fantastic.) Having typed all that, I'd rather be old and feeble here than, say, in Dallas, where I have to drive, until I'm no longer able to, and then have to rely on others for transportation. I'd gladly take a 20-minute journey down a stairwell that takes others 20 seconds for the freedom it would afford me.
  - awl130 10y ago
    how long until self driving cars in dallas?
    - parasitius 10y ago
      Have you been there? It's not something to look forward to. Every stinkin' place you want to go involves 45 minutes of road travel. Just because you get to zone out all the while doesn't mean your day isn't deprived of an immense amount of time. (To put things in perspective, I'm in Austin where everything, absolutely everything, is within 15 minutes' drive, but it is a "catastrophe" that during peak hours that becomes 35-40. Working at home and driving only off-peak hours has it's perks!)
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      Probably awhile. I can't reply to parasitius, because his comment is dead, but it's also nonsense. > Just because you get to zone out all the while doesn't mean your day isn't deprived of an immense amount of time. I'm glad that Austin is working out for him, but we can't shrink all cities, nor should we. 45 minutes of free time is still 45 minutes of free time.
  - schrodinger 10y ago
    It's true that there are a lot of inaccessible subway stations, but at the same time you're much more likely to be able to go about 90% of your life just walking around your neighborhood—restaurants, grocery, doctors, etc, all within a 10 minute walk is pretty standard in Manhattan.
parasitius 10y ago
But what's your point? This is an utterly rubbish reason/excuse for America's "great cities" to remain the shame/buttholes of the world forevermore. It is the Christianity + liberalism's worship of the poor that leads to subsidized instead of market-rate (PROFITABLE) subway trips which means no money to fix or improve anything unless the money can be stolen from tax payers (instead of the rational thing --> getting it from the fricking folks who BENEFIT from the subway).... Until we get over the age of altruism, America is doomed.
nickonline 10y ago
This is such terrible reasoning, the London tube was opened 40 years before NYC and they used wooden carriages pulled by a steam train. To suggest the reason the subway doesn't have air conditioning is because "It's old" is laughable.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  The London one only has air conditioning on the shallower lines' trains, since there is enough ventilation for the waste heat to dissipate. New York should be able to do the same. I think London is still working on cooling the deep, "tube" lines, where the clearance between train and tunnel is around 20cm.
  - nickonline 10y ago
    Sure - I guess the point I'm making is that technology has advanced significantly in the time

gcr 10y ago

I disagree. Even though the infrastructure is old, the public transportation in Manhattan is leagues better than most other American cities, considering what you can access. Especially the bay area. Living in the NYC area is also much cheaper even before figuring for car ownership costs.

JDiculous 10y ago
Living in NYC isn't cheap, and unlike other cities, the housing quality is old and terrible. For a tiny studio in a shabby 100 year old prewar walkup tenement building in Manhattan, you're looking at a minimum of $2,000/month. Most people pay $1,400+/month to live in old converted apartments (ie. putting up a wall to turn the living room into another bedroom) with roommates, and often the bedrooms are too small to even have room for a desk, and the window faces directly into another building (if there even is a window). In these buildings you're not going to have AC (meaning you need to buy a window AC unit), a dishwasher, trash compactor, elevator, and all the other luxuries we take for granted anywhere else in the modern world. I spent 3 years in one of these buildings, and the apartment was perpetually too hot (even in the winter), and there was nothing I could do because heat in the unit was not controllable. Apparently this is fairly normal in these buildings. If you want to live anywhere nice and somewhat modern that isn't a dump, you're looking at a minimum of $3,000/month for a studio, $4,000/month for a 1BR, etc. And want to buy a place? You're looking at a minimum of $500k for any studio that isn't a total piece of crap, and they're going to want a 20% down payment. And who wants to raise a family in a studio?
- ics 10y ago
  I live in a 3BR which is currently around $2.5k/month in beautiful Brooklyn just minutes from the A, C, and G trains. Next week I'll hear back as to whether or not I also have a $1k/mo studio with yard in a well-kept brownstone at the belt of Morningside Park. Most of my friends with studios pay around $1.5k to be in either newly renovated units in not-so-hot areas (upper reaches of Harlem for example) or tiny (200 sq ft) and run down units in more hot areas such as the East Village. None of these are rent controlled or stabilized. Your numbers are the worst case– maybe what you should budget for coming from out of town and looking for a first place, but certainly not the norm if you're looking on a budget. A quick search just now shows at least a couple good listings in the $2400-2900 range for 2BR in the East Village. In my opinion the two big takeaways from these discussions are that (1) New York is what you make of it and (2) New York, due in no small part to its transit system, is bigger than just downtown or uptown Manhattan. I've never had the amenities you listed even growing up so it's likely I don't appreciate them in the same way but there's plenty of other things the city offers to make up for it.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

> old compared to other world cities "Not being bombed into rubble" probably comes into play here.

santaclaus 10y ago

Oh god, those garbage bags. I remember a few winters ago, our street got clobbered on garbage day and giant piles of old garbage bags sat underneath a layer of snow for about a month. When the feet of snow covering the garbage bags finally started to melt we had a nice little bubbling stream of garbage downhill for a few days...

prawn 10y ago

Have they looked into underground garbage storage? I think in Paris (and likely elsewhere) they have large tanks below street level that are raised when trucks need to pick up the refuse.

terminado 10y ago
"They" have not. Even the underground in Manhattan is crowded. Manhattan is basically an island of very hard, solid metamorphic rock. Most of the city is plenty shot through with tunnels and foundations, and underground car garages. You could probably ask the sanitation department why they haven't explored these options: http://www1.nyc.gov/site/dsny/index.page http://www1.nyc.gov/site/dsny/index.page Please report back, if they ever reply to you. Also, "terror alert levels" are not a thing, and really haven't been, since like... 2004? And probably only lasted that long, since 2004 was an election year, for "you know who."
- Jack000 10y ago
  I saw it at the Staten Island ferry terminal last week, maybe because it's approaching 9/11? It had a yellow insert and said something like alert level 1. That combined with the "see something say something" ads does make me feel like terrorism might a real possibility. For my part I've avoided the subway at peak hours. I know it's pretty unlikely, but who knows.

kevin_thibedeau 10y ago

> why are the subways so hot? I believe the biggest cause is the heat from braking the cars all day. There is no regenerative braking in the system and the older trains have crude speed control so they're constantly braking to scrub speed between stops for curves and work zones. It all gets dumped as heat into the tunnels.

anentropic 10y ago

"why are the subways so hot?" welcome to London...