The Local
The system is enormous, mostly excellent, and explained almost nowhere in plain English. This is an attempt at that.
New York runs the largest rapid transit system in the world by number of stations, and it runs it twenty-four hours a day, every day, which almost nowhere else does. That combination produces a network that is genuinely hard to explain — because the map you are looking at is only true some of the time.
This guide covers the parts that confuse people: how express and local service actually works, what you now pay and how, which stations you can use with a wheelchair or a stroller, and why the train you took on Tuesday is not running on Sunday.
What is here
- The subway — lines, express vs local, and reading the map correctly
- Fares and OMNY — tapping, capping, and the discount programmes
- Accessibility — elevators, which stations, and what to check
- Buses — including Select Bus Service and why it is faster
- Ferries and the rest — NYC Ferry, the Staten Island Ferry, the tram
- Nights and weekends — the single biggest source of confusion
One rule that matters more than the rest
Check service before you travel, every time, at night and on weekends. Planned work reroutes trains constantly, and a line that runs express on a weekday can run local, run on another line's track, or not run at all two days later. Nothing on this site is a live feed, and no third-party app is as current as the MTA's own status page.