Enjoy your trip and please write up your findings.
Sure. Now I'm back in the UK I can do that.
Was only in NY for a couple of days before heading on to Orlando then CA.
Things were a bit mixed but have to admit I wasn't massively impressed by the subway.
On arriving, as planned I got the Q10 bus to 121st St, then J metro to Broad Street for the Staten Island ferry. The bus was fine, although slow (I made the mistake of getting the slow one instead of waiting for the express). The driver was extremely helpful, and called out the stop for me. Ditto the bus driver on the S46 once I got to Staten Island.
The Subway was certainly very no-frills in the design. I was not impressed by the uncomfortable plastic longitudinal benches on the trains. In fact, returning to the airport I happened to get on a very old train. That train had wooden seats (including a few transverse ones) and they turned out to be massively more comfortable than the modern plastic versions on the modern trains (Although I'd still have preferred UK-style soft fabric covers). So it seems that just like in the UK, the train designers in America have managed to make seats LESS comfortable over time, even when in the US the base line is a no-frills wooden seat!
I was also amused by the large numbers of stairs you frequently had use at stations. Getting up to the platforms at 121st St with a suitcase was certainly an experience!
One thing that really struck me as awful was the lack of information in stations. In particular, unlike London, there seem to be no network maps available. The day after I arrived, I entered the subway at Wall Street intending to travel to meet someone near Central Park. The route I was intended to take had severe disruption which meant I needed to change my plans, so I REALLY needed to be able to look at a map to figure out an alternative route, and the fact there simply were no maps to look at in stations helped to totally screw up my journey. I appreciate the network is probably trying to run while under-funded, but putting up direction signs and maps in stations seems a very cheap and obvious way to make the trains easier to use. I also noticed a similar issue when returning to the airport: Because of engineering works that weekend, some stations on (if I recall correctly) the R line were only being served in one direction. I'd found that out online, but when I got to the station, it turned out no-one had bothered to put any signs on the platforms advertising the fact! So there were people heading to the wrong-direction platform and then wondering why there were no trains! To my mind, that just seems utterly incompetent by the people who run the Subway.
I noticed the same lack of info at the St George bus station on Staten Island too. I arrived knowing that I could use either the S40 or the S46 to get to my destination. Turned out that those buses left from different stands, it was not easy to walk between the stands or to see from one stand if a bus was approaching the other stand, and there was NO timetable or departure information on the stands. That meant I basically had to randomly use one and take a chance on whether that was the stand that a bus would arrive at first.
Back to the Subway, I also had the impression of a very illogical layout in terms of how all the lines interconnected. This is very subjective and a bit hard to pin down exactly why, but whenever I was looking at the network map on my phone/computer and trying to work out routes to get anywhere, it seemed that there is a dense network of lines in Manhatten, but that somehow the various lines completely fail to interchange in a way that makes it easy to get from any point to any other point. Unlike London where, at least in the centre, you can basically get from anywhere to anywhere else typically with only one, or maybe 2, changes. Maybe to some extent that's because I lack the local knowledge I'd have in London, but route planning certainly felt a lot like I was fighting against no suitable connections.
On the upside the Staten Island Ferry is amazing! (And free!)
