NYC Subway

I guess this is the major one, the holy grail of public transportation. Basically every movie you see about New York mentions the subway or shows people getting around on the subway, and almost all of them have horror stories about the dangers of the New York subway system or how tough it is to navigate.

It's not that bad.

Despite looking like a multi-colored mess of spaghetti dumped onto Manhattan, if you have a basic idea of where you are and where you want to be it's actually very easy to navigate. Especially with something like Google Maps helping you out. The most danger you're in is getting hit on by a hipster (on the L), or getting peed on by a bum (anywhere). But that's no different from the rest of New York, really.

What you have to watch out for is express trains - they don't make all stops (because that's how express trains work) and you might be expecting to get out somewhere in the 50's and end up somewhere in the Bronx. That's a bad deal and isn't any fun.

For people who have never been on any sort of subway system before, it's not free. The easiest way to do things is to buy a MetroCard, available at lovely big machines in almost any station. Each trip is $2.00, but the best deal is to buy a MetroCard with more than $2.00 on it - you end up getting a free trip depending on how much you spend. It used to be if you bought a $10.00 MetroCard you would get one free trip. It's not that way anymore, I think they've gotten stingier, but the same basic concept applies. And don't worry, the MetroCard vending machine will tell you what to do, no guessing involved.

Manhattan is amazingly easy to get around using the subway. Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, all pretty until you get further out on the island and they start to spread out. Staten Island - don't even think about it. As you can see from the maps... there is no subway on Staten Island.

I don't have much else to write, because there isn't much else to write.

Rating: 8 out of 12. Fairly clean and safe but not well thought-out; takes some getting used to.