I’ve been doing some travelling around on the subway.
I bought a 7 day, unlimited rides ticket for $31 (+$1 for the actual card). This gave me ‘unlimited rides’ for 7 days, even though I’m only here for 3 and a half days. Subway tickets work rather differently from London TfL tickets. Mainly, there’s no daily cap – if you buy a normal ticket with, say, $15 credit, every ride you make will eat into that credit even if it’s your umpteenth ride that day. You can also buy individual rides for $2.75, but that looked like hard work and fiddly. The ‘unlimited rides’ ticket breaks even if you do more than 15 rides in the week which I won’t, but having it avoided a lot of hassle.
There’s no ‘tap in, tap out’ system because you don’t tap at all. On the way in you slide the card through a magnetic scanner and if it’s accepted, this unlocks the turnstile. On the way out you don’t do anything – you just walk through the turnstile the other way. I imagine that everything depends on the magnetic strip, so it’s probably a good idea to keep the ticket away from mobile phones.
As far as actually riding it is concerned, it’s pretty much like the London Underground. Once you’ve entered a station you’re free to move between platforms and different lines. One big difference, however, is the existence of Local and Express trains. The Express trains miss out a number of minor stations, they only stop at perhaps one station in five (or maybe even fewer). So there’ll be both Local and Express trains on the same route. The practical requirement for an Express train is that it has to have its own track – so it can whizz through stations without running into the back of a Local train – and this in turn means that some platforms are Express only. Not always, however – in southern Manhattan, on some lines all trains stop at all stations so in those cases there’s just a single platform for both Local and Express, and you have to pay close attention to announcements and indicators to see if the next train is a Local or an Express.
I didn’t use the buses at all so I don’t know how the ticketing on them works.
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