Getting around New York without losing an hour a day
The subway, the car, and the four times each is the wrong answer.
Visitors take cars because the subway looks complicated and residents take the subway because the cars do not move. The residents are right about four hours of the day and wrong about the rest, and knowing which is which is worth about an hour a day.
Take the subway
- Any weekday between 08:00 and 10:00, and again between 16:00 and 19:00. It is not close.
- Anywhere on the same avenue line — uptown and downtown are what the system is good at.
- In the rain. Especially in the rain: that is when a ten-minute car becomes forty.
Take a car
Crosstown, at any hour. Late at night below 14th Street. And whenever you are carrying anything, because stairs are what the subway actually costs.
Walk
Twenty blocks is a mile and a mile is twenty minutes. Almost every trip a visitor books a car for is under a mile, and above 14th Street the grid means you can never be lost for longer than one block.
Sample content for the RAVL beta. This article is test data on the staging environment, written for the seed rather than published — the byline is a test account and is not a real person.
