Why did I stop using the New York subway?
'07.07.2017'
Source: ForumDaily
When I first moved to the United States, my child was very young, I was moonlighting from home and using public transport only to bring my baby to a museum, a zoo or a park. Then the New York subway seemed to me incredibly convenient compared to the Moscow one: it was possible to enter it with a sidecar without holding back the heavy glass door and not wriggling on the escalator. Thanks to the elevators, a mother with a small child or a person in a wheelchair can use the subwoofer without help, and that’s just fine.
Dirty, of course, but you can put up with it. In summer, it's hot on the platform and cold in the carriage - well, that means you need to take a cardigan with you. But it works around the clock! In general, I did not complain and sometimes even defended the New York subway from friends dissatisfied with it.
As time went on, the child started attending school, and I was able to go to work and join the multi-million army of public transport passengers who move from Brooklyn or Queens to Manhattan every day. Driving to work if the office is in Midtown and the employer does not provide a preferential parking space is ruinous, and in our residential area, parking is such that it makes no sense to own a car; The queue for a garage space in our condominium has advanced by one person in the last 7 years.
Armed with a month pass ($ 116), every morning I took the subway at 7:30 with unpredictable results. If everything went well - about 2 days out of 5 - I ended up in the office at 8:15. More often I listened to the standard announcement “We are delayed because of train traffic ahead of us”(“ We are delayed because of the trains ahead ”).
By the way, I dismissed the idea of going to work for 9-00 almost immediately, noting that the more people, the longer the train stands at each station, letting in passengers.
Sometimes the delays were very serious - once I got to work for 2,5 hours because of the water that had leaked on the way somewhere around 34th Street. The loudspeaker driver advised passengers to inform employers that they were late, because they were on a train that departed at such and such a time from such and such a station - they say, all this can be checked. "They don't fucking care!“, - shouted one of the particularly irritable fellow travelers.
And this is only half of the journey: there was still a way home with eternal doubts whether I would have time to meet the child from school. An application that showed the status of movement on subway lines settled on my phone: every day I made a new route, combining brisk runs with trains F, E, M, R - so long as they went without delay.
We moved a few months ago. The new house is located at a distance of 2 kilometers from the old one, at the same kilometer distance as the old one, from the same metro station, but there is a nuance - a train stop LIRR was discovered between the new house and the metro (Long island rail road). The train travels to Midtown 18-20 minutes. So far, the train only once lagged behind the schedule for 8 minutes: that day there was a strong wind, and all employees who got to work from Brooklyn, arrived at 45-50 minutes later because of a tree that fell in the way.
There are no homeless people in the train, break dancers and urban madmen. In it, you can sit quietly and read a book, without risking to stand in the 20 tunnel for minutes to shout about the global lesbian conspiracy and the upcoming second coming of Christ. In the train cleaner and guaranteed to have sedentary seats.
I can even take a nap or stick headphones in my ears - on the subway, you might not notice that the train decided to change orientation and instead of F become M, or even B at best - I sincerely sympathize with all passengers who fell asleep on the way to Queens and woke up in the Bronx ...
All these pluses are possible at the expense of one fat minus: a one-way ticket during peak times costs more than $ 8. But a monthly ticket only costs $ 68 more than a metro pass, and that's a reasonable surcharge for all of the above. As a decisive argument, I would have had the opportunity to be guaranteed to be at home 30-40 minutes before the arrival of the school bus, taking into account the entry to the vegetable shop for fresh fruit, because the fine for a child not received on time is $ 20 (and this is a serious stress for the baby), and the average the cost of babysitter services in the city is $ 15 per hour.
If I had to answer in 3 words the question why I no longer use the subway, I would answer “because I can”. And the subway is a bit easier - minus one nervous passenger.
