On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, Nerdbird wrote:

This web site may be of interest to the visitor to London. The
Underground and taxis are discussed.

http://hometown.aol.com/nerdbird1/LondonNYC.html

Quite entertaining!

Other things that spring to mind (from my modest knowledge of London and
thoroughly scanty knowledge of NYC):

- You don't mention buses; i think they're cheaper and a lot more dense
and frequent in London, more geared towards local trips than commuting.

- What are New York's night buses like?

- The Underground is mostly more frequent than the Subway, but the trains
are shorter, so the capacity of a line is less (i think); that and the
narrower, lower carriages means they're even more densely packed than in
New York (or rather, are packed to capacity for longer - i've been on the
Lexington Avenue line through the financial district in the peak, and
that's as bad as anything we have!).

- London has more commuter rail than New York (particularly south of the
river), and it's often this which provides a more expressish service to
the outer reaches of the city.

- Hmm, is south-of-the-Thames London comparable to west-of-the-Hudson
Jersey in transport terms?

- A big one - London has rail links to all its airports! Stanstead has a
rail and a tube line, City has light rail (and used to have a railway
line), and the three outside the city, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton, all
have trains. In NYC, JFK and Newark have AirTrains, but they're only
shuttles that get to you to Subway/LIRR stations, so there's no
single-seat ride anywhere useful; i don't think LaGuardia has anything at
all.

- I think NYC yellow cabs are cheaper than London black cabs.

- London has minicabs as well as real taxis; they're like NYC yellow cabs
in that they're smaller, cheaper and nastier, and (generalising wildly)
you're likely to have an incomprehensible immigrant rather than an obese
cockney as a driver (actual line delivered to me by a minicab driver,
quite earnestly, as a comment on traffic conditions: "I wish i had a gun
with a ****ing silencer").

- Cycling is, from what my American correspondents tell me, a much faster
method of suicide in NYC than in London!

- Our street furniture is indeed terrible; a legacy of decades of
car-centric planning.

- Navigation on foot; aaaah, man up and learn your way! Once you get
the hang of it, you can have hours of fun figuring out the best route,
whereas in NYC, it's always obvious.

- I take it you know we do have a planetarium, but just think it's rubbish
- which is fair enough.

- Turkish, greek and urdu are other languages you hear a lot in London -
more so than the western european languages, in fact.

- We do have a couple of jewish neighbourhoods, which you probably never
ran into: Golders Green is the big one, and Stamford Hill is smaller,
poorer and much more orthodox, with furry hats and curly sideburns
everywhere you look.

tom

--
Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs, are *utterly
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