London Banter - View Single Post - Subway (New York) vs Underground (London) [Quite long]

Gareth Davis · April 6th 04, 08:40 PM posted to uk.transport.london

(Gareth Davis) wrote in message . com...

[snip]

Right time for a follow up to all the responses:

I agree that most of my comments about the NYC system were about the
overall ambience of it, some American friends described the London
system as immaculate - while I wouldn't quite go that far, we are a
bit spoilt by the way our stations look and are maintained -
especially the JLE stations. Near enough every NYC station I visited
showed some sign of renovation in progress - be it closed entrances
and escalators or freshly painted walls. If the money is going into
the infrastructure then it is better spent there, I would rather have
dirty stations than a dangerous infrastructure. I admit I didn't
mention the cars were air-conditioned since I didn't get to experience
it at this time of year, although my American friends inform me that
it tends to fill the sub-surface stations with uncomfortably hot air
as the trains pull in - which I believe is why we don't use it in
London.

Passenger information was my biggest problem while using the system. I
did have some quite substantial waits (i.e. 7+ minutes) during weekday
afternoons for trains. The London platform dot-matrix boards do help,
even if it does say 8 minutes you do at least know a train is
(usually) going to turn up and you can watch it count down as it
approaches - barring the dreaded 'Correction' message.

The NYC express running system I did like since it had dedicated
tracks set aside for it, tracks that I saw used for rerouting trains
at the weekends to allow maintenance work to take place without a full
line shutdown. Without a map I found it difficult to work out when to
change from the express to local lines as there was no indication or
announcement on some trains as to what the next station was. Putting
an underground map on every platform is all that is needed to solve
this - but every station I needed to check one in had them outside the
gateline along with the only member of staff to ask. Also the width of
the 4 lines running together meant that the surface entrances for
uptown and downtown could be a road, or nearly a block apart when
interchange to another line was involved - like at 50th Street E line
where I had problems finding the right entrance on the surface. Again
this would be resolved with better signage.

Overall it was not a bad experience using the subway, just a little
frustrating at times. Although whoever thought it was a good idea to
start putting the station clocks forwards the day before summer time
started deserves to be shot - the clock on 42nd Street FV platforms
caused me to get very worried about catching my flight on time. At
least in London we know the clocks won't get touched until the
following Tuesday

--
Gareth Davis