Hacker News Reader

Comment by kulikalov | Hacker News Reader

Subway is filthy and unsafe. No one I know would use it late at night. Most of the worthy cultural events are happening around Central Park and downtown. So, if you want the good parts of New York experience without a slight risk of being stabbed by a crazy person, you better live in a walking distance to one of these locations or commute on a car all the time.

View on HN

Oh my, this isn't true in reality. Yes, there are crazy people on the subway but the vast majority of people encounter them without incident.

It's very common to see small groups of kids traveling on the subway alone to get to school and they are perfectly safe.

Cultural events in New York city span all 5 boroughs, by the way. Central Park and "downtown" are by no means the cultural heart of the city. Have you even lived in New York???

This describes a very sheltered experience of NYC. There are a ton of cultural events in other boroughs. I don’t know anyone who is afraid to ride the subway and wouldn’t consider it dirty by transit standards. I’ve been in NYC for nine years.

I question your standards if you don't think that the NYC subway is dirty. I've ridden public transit in several cities across three continents, lived in three NA cities including NYC, and it does not come close. Smelling urine inside a train station is not normal.

I’ve ridden dozens of transit systems across four continents (I happen to collect transit means of payment as a weird hobby). Smelling urine is not a regular occurrence for me on the L or 4/5/6. Which lines do you usually ride? There are a lot of them and I know the experience varies.

I rode the A and the 2/3/4 lines usually. Try standing near the edge of the track. You'll get a whiff. It's not just that either, there's also a ton of litter and way more homeless people in the system than I've seen anywhere else. It's unhygienic to the point that it's a joke to New Yorkers not to get on a train car that's empty. Never seen that elsewhere.

Of course the state of the subway is a reflection of the city as a whole rather than an isolated issue, and that's true everywhere in my experience.

If you ride the Bart seeing urine is quite normal, along with the producer sitting in the middle of the puddle.

Agree with you on the cultural events, but the NYC subway is definitely dirty compared to the systems of the two other cities I've lived in (Toronto and London).

I was mostly in LIC and Manhattan though. Maybe it's not so dirty in the other boroughs?

This is so disingenuous I don’t even know where to start.

This pretty much describes the New York living experience of someone making a few million or with a trust fund, so it's an all-too-common perspective in Manhattan.

Conservative news circles have had this latent anti-NYC thing going on since Trump admonished it as a liberal mecca during his presidency.

Then when the pandemic hit and NYC was devastated, they were practically holding group orgy parties to get each other off about the fall of the city.

Then when the city started bouncing back it became "Well no, it's bouncing back as a dangerous crime ridden hell hole."

The "NYC is dangerous" thing is literally just conservative cope for the failed collapse during the pandemic.

hating on NYC has been a thing since well before trump. even before george W

Seriously. The whole "Ford to NYC: Drop Dead" thing was in 1975...

We lived in midtown Manhattan for 5 years. To get to the interesting (non tourist trap) 'cultural events' usually took a subway, or for underserved areas, took taxi (via hail, and pay with Curb app) to a borough off Manhattan island. Return to midtown took Lyft/Uber. Commuting by car is an extraordinary waste of time with high opportunity cost unless you use a driver.

Yes, the mega events are at Lincoln Center, Broadway, the Met, but that's very much like saying cultural TV is only on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX.

This is nonsense. Did you just move to NYC or something?

I suspect OP has never lived in New York...

> No one I know would use it late at night.

This does vary depending on the train and the station (I might recommend a tourist to avoid some stations on the J train at 3 am), but overwhelmingly most of the subway is safe at night, and more comfortable than during the day since you can actually get a seat. I ride it late at night, and so do many people I know.

> without a slight risk of being stabbed by a crazy person

So you've never been to Port Authority...

worthy cultural events.. what? You are missing out on like all of NYC

Reply on news.ycombinator.com