Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inferiorhuman | Hacker News Reader

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  NYC has a functioning subway system that can land you 2 blocks from just about anywhere. There are entire areas of San Francisco you have to navigate bus transfers, bus transfers that were not predictable, to get to. Bus transfers nearly always inflate trip time significantly and are subject to the unpredictable force of traffic.

To put it politely: that's a load of crap unless you equate Lower Manhattan with all of New York City. There are huge swaths of New York that are inaccessible via the subway (primarily the outer boroughs). Go to the more suburban parts of Brooklyn or Queens for instance. Here's a Bloomberg article on what they call "subway deserts" or the "plight of the outer boroughs"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-05/mapping-n...

   A subway that runs every 5 minutes

No subway runs every five minutes all day. Late night NY is every 20-30 (same as Muni), there's a wiki page for it. Per Muni's SRTP the light rail headways are b/t 12 and 20 minutes depending on the time of day. And before you complain Muni doesn't meet those standards, the New York subway is subject to human and mechanical delays just like San Francisco.

  Because if you can pay, parking in San Francisco is not too hard.

Eh? There are roughly 500,000 vehicles registered in San Francisco and about 275,000 on street parking spots. There are residential permits in some areas to ensure turnover because, yes, it can be extremely difficult to find a spot.

https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...

Large parts of outer NYC boroughs are inaccessible by subway. But other large parts of outer boroughs are very much accessible by subway, mostly those with high enough density to make it economically viable. But even Rockaway Beach is accessible by subway, of all places!

Trains go every 10-15 mins even some time past midnight. They go every 30 minutes at time like 3 am; so do some buses.

Compared to some other large cities around the world where I've been, NYC is pretty well connected, and Manhattan (all of it) is superbly connected.

The NY MTA does an admirable job, the issue I take is pretending that they're perfect. New York is pretty well connected, sure, and I can't think of another city that runs a subway 24x7. Even Tokyo shifts to buses eventually.

  Trains go every 10-15 mins even some time past midnight. They go every 30 minutes at time like 3 am; so do some buses.

Right, but OP was going on about rail service (with some key facts wrong). Buses stuck because they get in traffic… well all Muni Metro routes operate in traffic for most of their length (and one operates entirely in mixed traffic).

Muni schedules Owl (1–5 AM) bus service every 30 minutes. They run some regular bus routes 24x7 (not-Owl), Owl buses along the light rail routes, as well as a couple mega Owl routes to make up for the local routes that don't run late night. Except for Treasure/Yerba Buena Island (and the uninhabited islands), you can get within about 1/4–1/2 mile of anywhere in San Francisco on Muni. Evening rail service is like every 20–30 minutes on each line which equates to 10–15 (or better) underground since five of the lines run along the same subway tracks.

  Compared to some other large cities around the world where I've been, NYC is pretty well connected, and Manhattan (all of it) is superbly connected.

Yeah, New York City is generally well connected if you take into account the bus service. But so is San Francisco. I'd argue that the outer lands are better connected than the outer boroughs, but SF is so much smaller geographically that's not a fair comparo.

And yea I've done the subway bus shuffle in Queens (both because of subway maintenance and because of the distance to the subway) in the middle of winter. It's doable but OP was going on about not needing buses in NY. I've also done the late night subway thing and caught an earful from some natives who were real unhappy about all the transferring they had to do.

It's not that NY transit is bad or that San Francisco transit is particularly good. The idea that public transit in San Francisco is uniquely bad and grimy is just frustratingly wrong. That said, BART really shit the bed today when someone walked into the transbay tube. The mind boggles.

Also lets not forget that the NYC metro moves more people daily than the entire air travel network in the US does. It moves an incredible amount of humans at a scale that cars and airplanes just can't even begin to approach in a million years.

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