I'm in NYC currently attending a tech meetup. I received an Apple alert telling me that traffic was heavy and to allow for 40 minutes. Yet, I was able to arrive in 15 mins by subway: two stops express from 96th st to 42nd st. Then transfer local 4 stops.
Oh, it happens. Not often, sure, but you will experience it one day. The first sign is that everyone else will immediately turn upon entering the carriage, just like they do if some homeless person is using it as their personal toilet.
I caught an uptown C without air conditioning tonight. It was hot, but not as hot as the stations, and I got a seat. It happens, but not very often on that line.
I am highly skeptical of other replies to this post that make the subway seem like a summertime Shangri-La. While I think it's better than a urine- scented tardy hassle, I don't think many people who have spent a few years in NYC would describe their summer commutes as "pleasant".
Overall it's a miracle public utility that you don't appreciate as much as you should until you've left the city, but that July/August trip is a sweaty mass of humanity no matter how you crunch it.
Not really. Let's say your commute is 50 minutes, with 45 minutes of it being stuck in traffic - during which time you do move, just slowly and unpredictably. During those other 5 minutes though, you might be moving at a pretty good 60mph clip - so that's five miles. Walking that would take an hour.
And that's assuming you're in a walkable place. Many cities aren't built for it, and walking 30 minutes in 102 degree heat in Texas isn't a good option.
I commuted for two years from Long Island to work in Manhattan via the LIRR and subway. It wasn't the best, but it wasn't the worst. The sheer amount of time it takes to make the trip i did was more stressful than the jostling and rummmaging on the rush hour E train. Even in the summer.
After a few years I'm pretty much done with the subway except in off peak times perhaps. I've been milking the ride sharing wars and Continue to avoid the subway but it's not sustainable. I am ready for the suburbs I think!
People literally take shits in subway cars, especially at night. When people aren't taking a dump in the corner, the new subway cars have air conditioning systems that smell like stale halitosis.
But, the worst part about the new subway cars is that the robotic johnny cab voice doesn't have a weird accent. I actually enjoy the strange unintelligible squawking in a Brooklyn accent, drenched in the electromagnetic feedback of unshielded motors. Mostly because the robotic voice never has anything to useful or relevant to say, and if someone's going to say something pointless, I'd rather not understand it, and hear some kind of funny accent.
THIS THE NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY SYSTEM WITH AN
IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM THE MTA. KEEP YOUR
VALUABLE BELONGINGS OUT OF SIGHT. PROTECT
YOURSELF. STAY ALERT, BE COURTEOUS AND HAVE
A SAFE DAY.
Couldn't be the robotic voice more understandable for foreign people than one with a funny accent? Specially with messages like those that seem to be aimed at foreign people than native ones.
I consider these pointless announcements to be a form of auditory pollution, they do nothing but make you tune out all announcements, making it more likely that you'll miss the occasional useful one. I'm in the UK, rather than NYC, but our rail system is full of useful warnings such as "Don't leave your belongings unattended, they may be taken", and "It's been raining, so the floor might be slippery".
Seriously people, if you need warning of those things maybe just stay at home until you've grown up a bit.
It's not just the sound, the departure boards (which are supposed to tell you which train(s) are next) spend a lot of time with those useless warnings showing instead.
Ugh, I hate the tube for this. And I've noticed that that the 'importance' of the scrolling text has gone down over the years.
When I'm on a tube platform, if I'm looking at the upcoming trains, I don't need to be reminded that I shouldn't smoke or that there's Rugby coming up at the weekend.
I don't mean to be rude, but if you can't smell the the urine on the MTA, then your nose is broken from years of being conditioned to the smell.
I love NYC, and spend a few weeks there a year, but it always amazes me how natives argue that the MTA (and really all of Manhattan) doesn't smell like piss.
My cousins lived in Manhattan for years and we'd hang out from one to time.
I remember having this argument with them when crossing the street on garbage day in June or July. In addition to the background rotting garbage smell, some steam chimney thing in the crosswalk was basically spewing hot piss vapors. They were immune.
I grew up in Brooklyn in the late 60s/early 70s and spent most of my first 30 years in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I can tell you it used to smell a lot worse.
When we were young gutter snipes, we used to jump the wooden turnstyles, and if the cops chased us, head into the tunnels. We then spent our youth exploring the tunnels (the old station just off DeKalb Ave.). I miss those tokens with the 'Y' punched out in center! They cost 0.35 cents, and you could ride the subway to Coney Island, and still have money left for a slice of pizza when getting home by end of day when you started out with a $1.25 or so.
I was just visiting in January 2016, and it seemed great to me, and I am coming from having lived 8 years in SE Asia. I still go home 1 or 2 times a year to Brooklyn and Manhattan. Still I am amazed at the Hong Kong MTR. The cars don't have doors between them, so you can see all the way down to the front and back. They have sliding doors on the platforms, so no jumping in front of an oncoming train! Very clean too. Hong Kong is very vertical, and lot of wiring is alongside buildings in exposed trays or bundles. I am not sure about the rest of the infrastructure. Don't get me started on Vietnam or Indonesia. I have photos of electrical 'routing' that would give a NYC union electrician a stroke!
1. NYC is _BIG_. It's 304 square miles, which is about 17 by 17 miles. There are many places where biking is too far.
2. Subways, in contrast to popular opinion, don't go everywhere. Mainly, unless you live in Manhattan, or that's the only place where you want to go, the Subway system is quite lousy. Going from the airport to Coney Island takes an hour and a half by subway (according to Google), rather than half an hour by car. Now what happens if you have what to do in Queens, Far Rockaway, or NJ?
3. Expensive and no point. Due to #2, most NYers have to have a car, if at least for those off days when they want to leave the city or what. Once you have the car, driving it is much cheaper than taxi.
#3 holds if and only if there is affordable parking. UberPOOL to downtown Chicago and back can be cheaper than parking there, particularly for a long time.
> Going from the airport to Coney Island takes an hour and a half by subway (according to Google), rather than half an hour by car. Now what happens if you have what to do in Queens, Far Rockaway, or NJ?
Unless if it's during commuting hours, in which case they're pretty much equal I'd say.
17 miles is not a long bike ride unless you do not bike. 90min at a slow 11mph pace. A lot of people do 90min commutes. Scary car traffic is a much bigger reason people do not bike such routes, not distance.
That said, for such distances a moped or ebike could be much faster, while still evading gridlock that would slow a car.
It's 17x17 miles in a straight line, something that is impossible given the geography of the city and its waterways. I just picked a random cross borough trip from the Aquarium to Yankee Stadium and the shortest bike-traversable route is 22.3 miles despite the 2 locations being just 17.7 miles apart as the crow flies. That is a pretty straight route as well.
I think a majority of the motor vehicles are taxis, buses, private car services, and what does the most damage per vehicle - commercial vehicles. Box trucks take a much greater toll on roads than a bunch of average passenger cars.
I'm curious about this too. In SF it can make sense to have a car even just for travel within the city because public transit to/from certain areas can take forever compared to cars.
I was just dragging points around between random places on Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the difference in transit times between cars and public transit seemed pretty minimal almost everywhere I dragged the points to. In SF, there are certain well served areas where that is also the case.. but if you want to cut west from, say, Dogpatch to the Castro, it can take 2x-4x longer by public transit.
The subway doesn't go everywhere, and NYC is so big that mass transit can take longer to get to places than to drive. Driving in NYC really isn't that bad as long as you don't drive mostly in midtown. 75% of the rest of the city is perfectly drivable.
Secondly, the concentration of wealth/population is so high that even if a small minority of people drive, it still causes lots of congestion.
Well taxis are cars. Also a lot of traffic in Manhattan is commercial traffic - delivery trucks, contractors, ambulances, police cars. Those all pretty require cars.
There are many people who find cars a better choice: models who don't like getting their feet dirty so won't do the first two. Real estate agents who often have to pick clients up at airports or take them to NJ or Long Island. People who live in NJ and work in NYC to save money and can time their car commute to avoid bridge traffic, so cars are quicker than hours on buses or transferring to the PATH, etc.. I dated the first two and was the last for many years.
Have you ever taken the NY subway ? I have (but not in any recent history) and I remember it not being a very pleasant experience. But it may have changed.
Why people in (south-of-110th) Manhattan bother to own cars is beyond me. That said, the outer boroughs are (a) a long distance, in public-transit time, from the centre and (b) relatively unconnected by mass transit to the rest of Long Island and New Jersey (and to a lesser degree, Connecticut).
As a Manhattanite who prefers cars (i.e. Ubers, Junos, et cetera), it comes down to a few factors. One, cars are door to door. Two, cars are air conditioned/heated. And Three, I can take calls (and naps) in cars.
For what it's worth regarding point 3, I spent all of high school sleeping on trains to and from school. That said, I'm a tall male, so no one ever bothered me.
I don't live in NYC, but I can tell you why I drive a car in a city -
1) I used to bike for years while I was at uni. It's dangerous, and not very enjoyable in a city. It's ok on a nice spring/autumn day, but in sweltering sun or in winter or in pouring rain it's downright miserable.
2) subway - nope, because I hate being packed so close to other people. It's frequently smelly and unpleasant. Same with buses.
3) taxi - expensive, and I don't like being driven around by other people, would much rather drive my own car.
On the other hand, yes, driving somewhere is usually slower. But....I sit in my own clean environment, listening to podcasts or audiobooks, at the temperature that is fully controlled by me.
I am thinking it is a bit like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which has been continuously painted since it was built... The work crews when they get to the end of the bridge simply go back to the other end and start again... :)
EDIT: Just clarifying that it is not as simple as starting at one end and painting to the other and back again - simply that I have heard that there is always someone with a paintbrush or spray hose somewhere on the bridge working away.
A few weeks (months?) ago, I started setting my old iPhone up to do time lapse videos, and once or twice noticed some kind of maintenance tram running between the two towers: https://vimeo.com/179417477
I think every major bridge that requires repainting for maintenance _should_ be painted continuously. If you can do it faster, you should use fewer people. That way, you can keep around a worker crew who know the job inside out. The alternative would be to start up a new project every X years.
Yes, you could move the crew to work on another bridge, but why would you mess with their commute schedule, if it isn't necessary? Those that want the change of work always can move jobs to work on another bridge, or, if one company maintains multiple ones, ask their employer to be moved to a different crew.
Did anyone else click on the Empire City Subway link in the Article? This organization has intrigued me since I learned about them. You don't see their trucks often and when you do they are very low key looking, matte grey, simple block letters. They have nothing to do with the subway. Anyway if you missed it:
"Empire City Subway Company (ECS) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Verizon that specializes in subsurface engineering and construction services. Since 1891, ECS has held a franchise from the City of New York to build and maintain a conduit and manhole infrastructure in Manhattan and the Bronx. ECS rents this space to telecommunications and cable television service providers."
If you want to run fiber in in either of those boroughs you need to pay Verizon. Kind of odd that a public asset is controlled by a private company. Its basically a shadow company. A 125 year old franchise?
It's not an atypical arrangement (though, usually it's more likely that the power company owns the conduits rather than the telephone company). Those arrangements arose because the city doesn't want to get into the business of building and maintaining conduits. ECS provides non-discriminatory access to conduits at public rates: http://www.empirecitysubway.com/ratesbill.html. They charge Verizon the same rates as anyone else.
It is interesting how the work is divided up. Ecs is a company from way back when that Verizon bought. They only are in manhattan, Bronx, queens (I think). The other two Boroughs verizon handles the conduits.
Everyone is pretty much able to run their own lines down city streets. They just have to pay the city to lease space. They also have to agree to move the utilities when asked. And pay other contractors to work around the tightness their utilities cause.
Ecs does this management and maintenance for verizon and for all the other companies like AT&T, cable vision, level3, federal govt, tmobile, etc. Of course the other companies may also run their own conduits depending on the economics.
It's somewhat strange to me that they have this whole article, but is't mostly just excuses for types of problems that just come from USA's perspective and actions on infrastructure... You don't see the same excuses in other places. They either fix the problem, or admit that it's not organised well enough, yet this article does neither. (as far as I understood from the text)
Interesting. For me it was eye-opening because I had naïvely assumed all the construction was either for road repairs, or to build new subways; not the utility companies cutting up the road:
> But unlike Paris or Tokyo, where tubes and wires are usually bundled inside a cavernous sewer system or tucked underneath sidewalks, much of New York’s underground infrastructure lies within five feet of the asphalt surface.
> Last year, the [transportation department] issued 223,271 permits, about half of them to utility companies.
What do you propose that they do, though? Ideally we'd build a utility-only tunnel like Paris or Tokyo, but there's no space. You have the subway further underneath, and the sidewalks have basements.
Without a massive overhaul requiring eminent domain or a fire, the only solutions are better construction techniques, which they're looking into.
I always thought an elevated road like computer flooring for access. It would be a massive project, you'd have to step up to cross the street, and you'd still need access to the road below for the older, unmovable stuff. Either way, not happening, too much scope.
It falls back on evolving into something like the movie 'Brazil' with all of the ductwork ;)
this is essentially the story you will hear on the "Seattle Underground" tour. Instead of raising the city like they did in Chicago[0], Seattle built taller streets[1].
If there is one person I would like to meet in the world, it is the NYC Subway Dispatcher. When you are on the subway, he/she never carries good news. It always starts like this...
"Ladies and gentlemen: We are being held momentarily by the train’s dispatcher..."
That's kind of subjective. Every once in awhile, the stars align, and your slow local C train is now running express all the way to your stop at 145th...
... which is great, unless you're actually really trying to get to 103rd.
For you perhaps it's advantageous once in a while, but in the overall analysis, all commuters considered, any change to the schedule is more negative than positive.
I wonder about the breakdown of pothole causes. Yes, Nature's way will cause potholes and they will naturally expand if not rectified.
But then I think about the construction crew down the street from me, in Philadelphia, that didn't properly fill in and tamp down the trench they dug for a new sewer line. "Just fill it with some stones and dirt, and throw some Home Depot black top down on it," the foreman said, I imagine.
The thing grew, and became a gargantuan pothole. Eventually the city fixed it, and granted this probably has everything to do with the contractor in question, and I've seen larger construction companies doing things right, but I'm convinced we could eliminate a lot of potholes if crews just did the job right.
There was a case of a german geothermal company that drilled a hole down to the ground water without sealing it properly. Turns out there was a huge deposit of Anhydrit below the town. In combination with the water it formed plaster and expanded in volume causing cracks on the buildings on the surface.
The street outside near my apartment has been under constant construction during the entire 5 years I've lived there. They literally tear open the same part of the street multiple times, and cover it back up again, only to tear it open again, etc.
One day I asked one of the workers why they keep tearing open the same part of the road, why couldn't they just replace everything that is broken in one go?
He told me that they often do find and fix the problems, but sometimes they can't find them and give up, or sometimes they do and only kind of fix them. Other times they do fix the problem, only to have another in the same area. He also said sometimes an electric guy will mess up the plumbing, etc. And they aren't allowed to touch and telecom stuff. He said that sometimes some crews will just cut out his work, or cut into their pipes, drill and bolt into their pipes or riggings, causing leaks, etc.
I'm sure at some level this keeps these guys busy but its a wonder we haven't been able to come up with some kind of better system or way of doing things in all these years.
I find interesting that you could read what the worker said as a metaphor to software development.
And if a worker were to look at how some code changes just looking at the files modified, he would probably notice that we keep tearing open and modifying the same piece of code many times, he might ask why can't we just fix all the bugs at once.
That sounds a little bit like a software developer's bubble to me!
Yeah, most software is a bit more complex than underground utilities. But the latter are far from the same, and I'd argue it's actually much more difficult to prod, examine and debug what's going on underneath an active roadway than it is to debug a bit of software, for example.
You sound like some computer illiterate that can only understand the Internet as a series of tubes(when it comes to your understanding of what is going on under the streets). Rather than seeing communication protocols, physical networking, social/actual contracts, and whatever else.
Just spend 20 minutes looking at/reading ladder diagrams, an organizational method electrical control systems. You'll learn that you pretty much 1 for 1 programming logic (that first motor controller you look at is the same as hello world, and algorithmically it's somewhere between 6 and 12 if statements).
Going by your metaphor some lines of code in your codebase (not in libraries) are licensed by different companies and only they have the right to fix the bug.
> I'm sure at some level this keeps these guys busy but its a wonder we haven't been able to come up with some kind of better system or way of doing things in all these years.
I've heard there exists a dramatically better system but I think the technology got classified as secret many decades ago. One day it shall be declassified and we might see some very substantial progress in this area.
As an engineer who has worked in both the design and construction side of utility work in NYC, allow me to explain why utilities are such a big problem. Every utility not owned and operated by the city or MTA must pay the city for use of their right of way, meaning streets and sidewalks, in between property lines. If a utility were to operate within outside of the right of way in private property they would have to pay the property owner to use the land As an easement.
A utility company has an agreement with city and pays the city on those terms to move the facility when told to do so at own cost (gas lines are exempt because they are international lines). It also must pay contractors when working near those lines for the discomfort they cause.
Utilities don't just have conduits or pipes running down, but also manholes and chambers, and some of them are huge. I once came across a 90' x 60' x 40' underground substation. These chambers cause other utilities to avoid them by switching lanes and going to the sides. These switches cause greater infrastructure density, or more pipes in an area.
For places like manhattan, telephone company requires more conduits and wires in every street than any where else. Some companies insist in a conduit just for themselves, like Amazon AWS to run their own services. Parallel to that are electric lines that require large pipes for the huge area it serves. Same goes for gas main and the next annoyance e.g. Steam, which is difficult to move around.
If the city were to come and build something, pretty much everyone has to move things around. This is what causes a significant spaghetti buildup. Eventually, it becomes virtually impossible to locate or record location of everything. Add to that the age of records and the frequent loss of records.
Designing utilities is an art of patience. Constructing around them is far worse. Recording them is poorly done. I was very peculiar about accuracy of records but even I had to sometimes wing it. And I am pretty sure few take the time to painstakingly record and draw stuff like I did.
Problems like this make me imagine that all utilities should be placed vertically in a chamber easily accessible and maintainable. But that is naive.
That explains a bit but it doesn't explain why manhattan's streets are so much more fucked up than cities of comparable size and complexity elsewhere, many of which are much older.
I was taken aback by the state of the roads in NYC when I first visited. How on earth can a country so in love with cars not have their roads in better condition? The condition of footpaths wasn't much better. Especially horrible was trying to avoid stepping in the pool of stinky fluid that leaks out of the trash baskets on the corners of intersections.
So, does anyone know how this compares to other cities?
Because over here in the UK (especially in London), it feels like there's a never ending stream of roadworks being done at any one point in time. Heck, the roads themselves look like a patchwork quilt made of whatever pieces of asphalt and cement were lying around that week.
So any comparisons? Is New York worse than other cities of a comparable size? In the US or abroad?
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