How to Navigate the Subway in NYC | Ultimate Guide

the subway one of the greatest gifts and curses of New York City if you've never gotten to experience it for yourself it might seem pretty scary there's all these squiggly lines that look like they're going in all different directions it might seem dangerous to some people and if you've never been to a big city with a complex transit system before everything probably looks pretty for it but let me assure you the New York Subway system is actually a lot more simple than you might think by the end of this video if you pay close attention you are going to have a fundamental understanding of how the subway system works here and hopefully you'll feel a little less apprehensive about taking it to get from point A to point B first things first if you want to rent the subway you're gonna have to do one of two things one get a metro card or two make sure Apple pay is set up so that when you put your phone up to the scanner you can get through to turn stock okay so when it comes to getting a metro card here's what you're gonna do first find a ticket machine press start and choose your language when you're prompted to select a MetroCard type you're going to press the button in the middle that says metro card now if you don't have a card yet you're going to select get new card if you already have one then you're going to select refill your card now you're gonna see two options regular MetroCard or unlimited ride this is probably the most important part because if you select the wrong one you might end up wasting a lot of money if you select regular metro card you can choose how much value you want to put on the card and if you select unlimited ride you can choose between a seven day pass or a 30-day pass which allows you to take as many rides as you want in that time frame now if you're visiting for a short time frame even if it's just two or three days I would recommend getting the unlimited pass for 33 dollars the reason I say this is because you're probably going to be taking the train quite a bit and each ride costs you 2.75 so if you end up taking more than 12 rides which you probably will then you'll have spent more money than you had to had you gotten the unlimited card and if you're traveling with family keep in mind you're gonna have to get one unlimited card for each person because you can't just swipe people in back to back with the unlimited car see what the MTA did with Smart Gear they made it so that once you swipe your unlimited card there's a 15 minute delay before the next time you can swipe it so that you can't just swipe everyone in when it comes time to pay for your Metro card I would personally recommend using a credit card because a lot of the times the ticket machines aren't accepting cash for whatever reason also if you're traveling from outside of the country when it asks for your ZIP code just put nine nine nine nine nine five nine okay so this is everything you need to know about the metro card but your other option is to just pay with your phone and for this you're gonna need to make sure that you have Apple pay set up once you have Apple pay set up you're going to want to go into your wallet settings and press Express transit card from here pick which one of your credit cards you want to use to pay for rides and you're good to go one cool thing about about using your phone to pay is that Omni the one Metro New York system has introduced this thing called Fair capping where after paying for 12 rides in the span of a week all of your subsequent rides are free while using your phone is definitely the way to go if you're a local I still wouldn't recommend it for tourists yet see this fare capping system tracks your rides in a seven day period from Monday to Sunday so if you were to arrive in New York on say a Wednesday or Thursday you would likely end up paying more because the bear capping system resets at the beginning of each work week also if for whatever reason you don't have a metro card or a phone that can make contact with payments you can also put your credit card directly on the scanner if it has a chip and it'll charge you the regular 275 to get in now personally I don't really recommend this option but if you're in a time crunch or you're just not planning on taking the subway very often then go ahead so with all the different payment methods available right now my recommendation Edition would be if you're a tourist get the seven day unlimited pass and if you're going to be living here go with the Omni system when looking at a map of the subway for the first time it probably just looks like a bunch of squiggly lines but at least when it comes to Manhattan the majority of subways run either North or South but here people just call it uptown and downtown in Manhattan there's five main lines that go north and south not exactly but pretty close they're the ones in blue red orange yellow and green but New Yorkers don't call them that instead of saying the green line a New Yorker would call this a 456 and that's because there's three different trains that run along these tracks and they are the 4 train the 5 train and the six truck now you might be asking why are there three different trains if they all run on the same line and well my answer is they don't when going through the middle of Manhattan these trains might appear to be going on the same line but if you follow them out to the the other Burrows you'll see that all of a sudden they sprawl out into a bunch of different directions and now you might be saying well if they only split off further down the line does that mean they're at least the same in Manhattan and again the answer would be no which brings us to the next topic local versus Express in New York you have two different types of trains the local train and the express train and the difference between these two is that local trains make stops at every station while Express trains only make stops at specific stations meaning they skip all the local stops I know this makes things a bit more complicated but it's actually super helpful because if someone has to travel a longer distance say from Uptown to downtown they're able to get there in a fraction of the time it would take if they only had local trains on the other hand the benefit of having local trains is that you can get pretty close to wherever you need to be so you don't end up having to walk a super long distance once you get off the train now here's a list of all of the trains that are local and here's one of all all of the trains that are expressed but let's be real you're probably not going to remember all of that especially if it's only your first time so what you can do instead of memorizing all of this is take a look at the map and you'll see that each station has either a black dot or a white dot the black dot means that only local trains make stops at that station and the white dot means that both local and express strains make stops there and if you want to be 100 sure underneath the names of each station on the map there's a list of numbers and letters that denote which trains stop there also when the train arrives at your station make sure you keep an eye out to make sure that it's the right one the last thing you want is to be waiting for a one train and then accidentally get on two or three and end up on the other side of town so now you have a basic understanding of all the different types of trains and what their different functions are but there's still a few things you need to know before you're ready to go out on your own before you even make your way into a subway station a lot of the time you're gonna need to make sure that you're on the correct side of the street because just like cars the local trains here also only travel on the right side of the road so if you are facing Uptown and you enter a station on the right side of the road that train is going to take you Uptown if you're facing downtown and you enter on the right side you're gonna go downtown now if you know that you're going to a station that has Express stops then you don't need to worry about this but for a lot of the smaller local stations this does trip newcomers up myself included when I first got here but now you might be asking well how do I know which way is north and south and to that I would say the best thing you can do is get a general idea of what the skyline looks like in New York I'm not saying you have to know every building but if for example you see the World Trade Center you know that's downtown and if you were to see the Empire State Building you know that's Midtown another thing you could do is to keep track of the street numbers when you're walking so like if you go from 33rd to 32nd to 31st you know you're going downtown and if you go from 59th to 60th to 61st you know you're headed Uptown another thing that I could see causing some potential confusion are all of the announcements and different signages that you hear and see when you're either on the subway or waiting at the station so for example when you're on a train you might hear something like decision thank you now this does not mean that you messed up and are headed straight for the Bronx all this is saying is that the train is headed in the direction of the Bronx which is north of Manhattan or Uptown and the last stop on that train is at Pelham Bay Park and on a lot of the signs when you're waiting for a Subway you might see something like two Bay Ridge 95th Street and think well what the heck does that mean and all this is saying is that the last stop on the train is at Bay Ridge 95th Street which is in Brooklyn luckily there is usually something on the sign that says Downtown in Brooklyn but I will say it would definitely be beneficial for you to take a couple minutes to study up on where each of the five boroughs are in relation to each other also if you are one of the adventurous Souls who has decided to venture out Beyond Manhattan into one of the other four boroughs first of all I applaud you because some of the coolest places in New York are actually outside of Manhattan and second you're definitely going to want to make sure that you look out for those signs that say Bronx queens and Brooklyn because the last thing that you want is to make it all the way out to the middle of the wrong burrow also if you are going out to another Borough your best bet is going to be to put the address on your phone because there are lots of nuances when it comes to all of the different lines out there for example local trains can become Express trains Express trains can become local trains sometimes there's outer bro Express trains but only during rush hour and only going in One Direction and also the train service gets a lot less reliable later at night but luckily Google Maps and Apple Maps are pretty good about taking all of these factors into account so in cases like these just use your phone the last thing I want to point out is that I know I said the trains primarily go uptown and downtown but there are a select few that go Crosstown those being the seven s the L and also certain parts of some of the trains that we talked about earlier besides that if you need to travel east to west you're probably gonna have to take a bus but luckily you get free transfers between trains and buses and buses are covered in the unlimited passes that we talked about earlier [Music] now before you go running to get on your first ever Subway there's need to know about so you don't upset any impatient New Yorkers and with me here today I have my good friend John who is a local born and raised New Yorker and he's going to be sharing some of the do's and don'ts on the subway isn't that right John number one when you go to enter a Subway don't just walk in without letting everyone else off first it pisses people off and it messes up the flow and when it comes to sitting down don't take up more space than you need or lay down on the seats or do whatever that is if you're one of those people who decides to listen to music out loud just know you've instantly become the most hated person on the train and your music sucks if you ever see a train that looks suspiciously empty just know there's probably a reason sometimes we end up getting packed like sardines on the train make sure you shower but not on the train and lastly avoid awkward eye contact you're either gonna creep someone out or invite some attention that you might not be ready for yeah I told you [Music] so that is everything I have for you in today's video I know this doesn't cover everything there is to know about the New York City subway system but if we did that we would be here all night and really my main goal with this video was to give you just enough information so that the next time you find yourself in the New York City subway you know what you're doing to be honest if you really want to be a pro when it comes to navigating the subway the best thing you can do is sit down and take some time to really study the map no joke when I found out that I was going to be moving here for school my mom actually bought me a shower curtain that had a map of the entire New York subway on it so really a lot of the information in this video was stuff that I learned on the toilet and lastly if you are still having trouble figuring out how to get where you need to go just look it up

Channel: Adam Perry

Views: 6,720

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Id: oH6qpE1HMaE

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2023