Why did I stop using the New York subway?

When I first moved to the United States, my child was very young, I was moonlighting from home, and I used 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 presence of elevators, a mother with a small child or a person with a wheelchair can use the subwoofer without assistance, and that’s just fine.

It's a bit dirty, of course, but you can live 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 didn’t complain and sometimes even defended the New York subway from acquaintances who were dissatisfied with it.

Time passed, the child began to attend school, and I was able to go to work and joined the multi-million army of public transport passengers who move daily from Brooklyn or Queens to Manhattan. Coming to work by car if the office is located in Midtown and the employer does not provide a preferential parking space is ruinous, and in our residential area the parking situation is such that owning a car makes no sense; The queue for a garage space in our condo has moved up by one person in the last 7 years.

Armed with a monthly pass ($116), I took the subway at 7:30 every morning with unpredictable results. If everything went well - about 2 days out of 5 - I would be in the office at 8:15. More often I listened to the standard announcement “We are delayed because of train traffic ahead of us.”

Metro in New York. Photo: Depositphotos

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 - I once had a 2,5 hour commute to work due to water leaking along the way somewhere around 34th Street. The driver, over the loudspeaker, advised passengers to inform their 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 was installed on my phone that showed the status of traffic on the subway lines: every day I made a new route, combining dashes at a fast pace with trains F, E, M, R - as long as they ran without delays.

A few months ago we moved. The new house is located 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 - between the new house and the metro there is a LIRR (Long Island Rail Road) train stop. The train travels to Midtown in 18-20 minutes. So far, the train has only once been behind schedule by 8 minutes: that day there was a strong wind, and all the employees commuting to work from Brooklyn arrived 45-50 minutes late due to a tree that had fallen on 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 put headphones in my ears - on the subway you may not notice that the train has decided to change orientation and instead of F it becomes at best an M, or even a B - I sincerely sympathize with all the passengers who fell asleep on the way to Queens and woke up in the Bronx .

All these advantages come at the expense of one big disadvantage: a one-way ticket during peak times costs more than $8. But a monthly pass costs just $68 more than a subway pass, which is a reasonable premium for all of the above. As a decisive argument, it would be enough for me to be able to be guaranteed to be at home 30-40 minutes before the school bus arrives, taking into account going to the grocery store for fresh fruit, because the fine for a child not being picked up on time is $20 (and this is serious stress for the child), and the average The cost of babysitting services in the city is $15 per hour.

If I had to answer the question in 3 words why I no longer use a subway, I would answer “because I can.” And the subway is a little easier - minus one nervous passenger.

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