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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

This doesn’t comport with my experience on the UWS: the subway was almost always faster for me, rush or not. The only exceptions were cross-town and way out on the 7, e.g. Flushing. My commute from Harlem (when I lived there) to the financial district was 25 minutes by train; a similar car commute would have been around 40 (and I would have needed to find parking).

People take ride shares and taxis because of separate pressures, including very reasonable ones like needing to haul something bulky to a specific address or trying to get to their airport (I will freely acknowledge that the subway connections to LGA and JFK are pitiful).

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That's because you live in UWS (that's where I live too).

I used to live in Jamaica and trying to get anywhere that's not Manhattan is a chore. For example going to Flushing would take twice as long because you have to get close to Manhatten before you can switch from F line to 7.

Bus in this case works fine most of the time though. But you still need to walk to a bus station.

I grew up on the UWS (technically not, but it’s now called that because of neighborhood creep), but I currently live in Brooklyn.

That’s a fair point — there are a couple of pathological routes in the subway system, and traveling between Jamaica and Flushing is definitely one of them. But yeah — IME the bus tends to cover those gaps relatively well; the MTA’s priority (for better or worse) is high-traffic routes, meaning routes between the outer boroughs and Manhattan.

I mean, yes, I think it’s fairly well-known that the further out from Manhattan you are, the worse NYC public transit is. At the most extreme end, if you live in Statin Island you’re gonna have a bad time. Not coincidentally, many people there have cars.

IMO, the key idea here is that public transit is slower in places that have bad public transit. To find examples of really good public transit, you have to look outside the United States.

I picked this UWS example because it is the absolute most generous example you could possibly make. It's a relatively long distance to cover via bike or car and there are multiple express+local stops to hop on at.

And it's still slower for almost any trip you'd need to take where your subway exit isn't exactly where you needed to go. If you add walking 2-3 blocks north/south and 2-3 avenues east/west at entry and exit the uber/rideshare starts to dramatically leap ahead.

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