The Joys of the Subway

The subway is what makes Manhattan fun and functional. Trains run frequently during the day and they run fast. One hears about stoppages as one hears of other rare natural disasters like earthquakes and tornadoes. There's the 7-day unlimited pass for $25 that is a tremendous bargain, while taxi rides are each $5-10 around town.

The routes do take some getting used to. To correlate the subway map and the surface street map, and the 'house' numbers, requires two maps and some asking for help. The stations are 2 blocks long, minimum, and where routes cross, the stations are connected in ways that are topologically interesting and not always predictable. Signage is designed for the cognoscenti. One quickly learns that "uptown" means more or less north, or away from Wall Street, and "downtown" is of course toward the southern tip of Manhattan. It is possible to get slightly lost in these stations. Asking for directions is usually but not always helpful.

Google is useful, but so are the people on the street. Someone wearing work clothes and toting a work-related container generally knows the neighborhood.

So we take a subway map and a street map, and consult them often. It makes transfers easy, and makes the travel efficient. It's great fun to figure out efficient connections. Still, there are moments.

Such as when we are standing in the Times Square station at 11 pm waiting for a B train that will take us straight home. There's a sign saying "no B trains 12:30-5:30 am." We wait. At 11:25 it dawns on us that the times on the sign are approximate; maybe the last B train has to be in the barn way out in Queens by 12:30, and it's already gone past. So we trudge over to the other side of the station and take a 1 train, which comes in 4 minutes, as usual. In 6 more minutes we're walking along the sidewalks toward home.

Or when we are descending into a new station. The signage is slightly unclear here, and we are heading for the E train. I say to a man, "Is this the way to the uptown train?" "Yes," he says, "down these stairs and to the left." We stand peacefully on the platform; an E arrives, we get on it. But the station names don't fit the sequence on the map.

I inspect the map. We took a downtown train, and are 3 stations into Brooklyn. But the solution is simple. We leave the train at that stop, cross the platform, and take the next E in the 'tother direction. We lose ten minutes and have no appointments to keep, except with our stomachs in a nice inexpensive restaurant.

Another day, we are hurrying to get to the Cloisters, so we walk up to the express stop at 96th to take the train to 168th, another express stop, where we can transfer to the A, up to 190th. At the 96th St. station, we arrive at precisely the right moment. On our left, there's an express train, on the right a local. I jump on the express, gloating a bit at our good fortune. Izzie tags along. The doors close, both trains accelerate.

I look up at the lighted route board above the windows. Oops. This express route turns east into Queens. It's a long five minutes to the next stop, Central Park North. We cross the platform there and catch the next train back to 96th, where we wait for another 1 train. I am feeling more constricted on time and less in a hurry, if you get my drift.

But when it works well, it really works. We're on the upper West Side at the Guggenheim, and want to go to Chinatown. The express 4 at 86th takes us down to Canal Street in about 12 minutes. When done there, we walk over the Ground Zero, then take the E to West Greenwich Village for lunch, then take the local C back home. Fast, efficient, no traffic jams, short waits for trains. It's a weekday in NYC.

On the other hand, if you want to go across town, the taxi is much faster and always less that $10. Unless it's raining. Then they're all full.