Notes on New York
Mostly transport
If there was a capital city of the world, then New York would be a good bet.1
It’s the most populous and important city of the most powerful country in the world. It’s the world financial capital. It has the second-highest GDP of any metropolitan area in the world (just pipped by Tokyo). It’s a cultural powerhouse. And it already has the UN headquarters.
Given its stature, New York feels instantly familiar to a newcomer: the boroughs, the bridges, central park, wall street, the empire state building, times square, the art deco styling, the pizza slices, the yellow cabs. As such, there’s not much point in mentioning all that stuff. Instead, these are notes on the things that I hadn’t already gleaned from cultural osmosis.2
The cityscape
Streets and avenues
Like most US cities, New York is arranged in a grid pattern. This makes it easy to navigate. If you’re on 54th street, and want to get to 60th street, then you just follow an avenue up six streets. Easy!
And it is streets and avenues. If we pretend that Manhattan island is north-south oriented (it’s actually northeast-southwest)3, then avenues are the longer north-south/vertical roads, while streets are the shorter east-west/horizontal roads. The streets are then split into east/west versions at the midpoint. It’s all very high modernist. Unfortunately for the American love of uniform grid cities, naturally-occurring islands are rarely perfect rectangles, and so this system breaks down (or never started) at the bottom of Manhattan, where the streets just get names rather than numbers. While I spotted an occasional boulevard, and a rare lane, in general their road nomenclature seemed to have less variety than in the UK.
Skyscrapers
New York’s skyscrapers are just as impressive as you would expect. One thing I hadn’t quite realised before is that slender skyscrapers look taller than wide ones.
For example, this is the recently constructed 111 Murray Street, a residential building near the financial centre. Its impressive slenderness makes it look every bit of its 241 metre height. (And it is tall: it’d be the third tallest building in the UK, ahead of One Canada Square in Canary Wharf.)
But that image is cropped from the following photo:
111 Murray Street is dwarfed by One World Trade Centre, which at 546 metres (to the antenna, at least) is more than double the height. (The difference is exaggerated by the angle of the photo, but not that much.) Viewed in isolation, however, I feel like 111 Murray Street looks taller, due to its slenderness.4
This height-accentuating effect was in full effect in the new pencil towers on Billionaire’s row, and the recently-completed Brooklyn Tower, which looks like something out of City 17:
Rubbish
Disposing of rubbish (garbage, trash) is a challenge in places with high housing density.
In low density areas, houses usually get bins which can be collected weekly, fortnightly, or whatever. But in high density places this leads to far too many bins clogging the streets. (When I lived in London, the binpeople took the bins straight from our front garden to prevent this.)
Cities often solve the rubbish issue by placing giant communal bins at designated locations. These can be unsightly and smelly, though, so some cities (like Amsterdam, and now Liverpool) have put these large bins underground.
New York ‘solves’ the refuse issue by leaving giant piles of rubbish bags at the side of the road:
Apparently these bags are taken ‘multiple times per week’, but that doesn’t prevent the mountains piling up in the interim.
‘Please curb your dog’
I saw a lot of dogs in New York. Given the high price of land, the average house/apartment must be quite small, which would be conducive to smaller dogs. While I did see a lot of small dogs, I also saw a Great Dane, an Irish Wolfhound, and a St Bernard. Are large dogs status symbols?
Dogs generate waste, and New York also failed to handle this very elegantly.
Throughout the city there are trees, which are generally surrounded by some kind of low barrier, and a sign saying ‘Please curb your dog’. I first saw this near a shop, and assumed that it meant that the dog must be left outside on the curb. (The American spelling of kerb.) In fact, this means ‘restrain your dog’, or, as made clear by some more explicit signs, ‘do not permit your dog to relieve itself on or near this tree’.
I felt rather sorry for these dogs, who must walk some distance from home before being able to relieve themselves in some kind of park. I felt sorrier still when I saw the parks. Outside of the big ones like Central Park (Manhattan) or Prospect Park (Brooklyn), many parks are quite small, and often limit the public to the paths. Not ideal for dogs. They compensate by having mini-dog areas, but these tended to be sad affairs of astroturf or concrete, which basically amounted to giant open-air urinals. (It didn’t help that some days were around 30C (86F)).
In contrast to the surfeit of dogs, I saw perhaps two cats over my entire stay. (Cf London, where you’ll tend to see at least two cats per street.) Are cats required to stay inside? Are they scared of the dogs? The cars?
Aesthetics
New York is famous for art deco styling, but I wasn’t sure how much of that was based on a few over-exposed examples like the Empire State Building. As it turns out, New York’s appreciation of the aesthetic is real, with many buildings featuring beautiful ironwork and lobbies in the style.
Elegant art deco fonts can be found on otherwise drab utilities buildings:
An especially over-the-top variation on the ‘Curb your dog’ theme:
And even water standpipes can be turned in aesthetic features:
Greenery
I didn’t get a chance to visit either of the Botanical gardens, but I was pretty underwhelmed by the green spaces I saw. Smaller parks’ planting schemes often involved the same few plants laid out in a rigid grid pattern, while larger parks were mostly sub-Capability Brown lawn-and-trees affairs. Nonetheless, the juxtaposition of even greenery and skyscrapers is always pleasing:
August generally isn’t a great time to see gardens, with the most impressive displays having already finished. Even with that in mind, I found the famed Piet Oudolf designed High Line somewhat underwhelming too. The paths were understandably broad, to accommodate the very high foot traffic, but this left a fairly narrow strip for the planting in most places. It had its moments, but based on what I saw, I’d give the aesthetic edge to the average National Trust garden.
Also, New York seems obsessed with Hydrangeas.
Transportation
Bikes
The stereotype is that America is extremely car-centric. This isn't false, but New York did have some rather good cycling infrastructure.
I saw a lot of interestingly styled road bikes and single speeds. I assume that this was because cycling is a subculture rather than the default culture, and that the bikes one sees are disproportionately those of hobbyist enthusiasts.
One very common mod was to wrap the frame in heavy tape. I guess that this is to protect the paint from the heavy chains and D-locks necessary to protect them against the notorious bike thieves. (Kryptonite gives their most secure locks the ‘New York’ marque.)
What interested me most, however, was the ubiquity of ebikes. I didn't keep a tally, but these seemed more prevalent than regular pedal-powered bikes. Many looked like converted regular bikes with the battery pack mounted to a rack at the back.
By contrast, in Cambridge and London (the UK’s most heavily cycled cities) it remains a novelty to see ebikes. I suspect that New Yorkers are simply ahead of the curve on this one. They were often ridden by unathletic looking delivery people, sometimes flying down the street at what seemed to be about 30mph.
While New York is famous for bike theft, they also have some fantastic bike stands:
These emerged from an open competition to design a new bike stand. Everything about the competition seems odd.
First, the official website is hosted for free on Wordpress. (I don’t recall this being normal even in 2008.)
Second, the schedule. The competition was announced in March 2008, and the first submissions were due less than 3 months later in June 2008. Prototypes had to be submitted in September (in 6 months), and the final award was made in October (in 7 months ). This is almost unbelievably fast for any modern public project. Speed fans, take note.
Third, perhaps because of the limited publicity, most of the finalists are rather poorly designed. The chosen hoop design is head and shoulders above the rest.
Fourth, this was a remarkably cheap exercise. First place received $10,000; second place $3,000, and third place $2,000. A total prize pool of $15,000 is astonishingly cheap. (I hope that the winners receive some kind of royalty.)
Fifth, the winners were ‘Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve (Bettlelab), based in Copenhagen, Denmark’. Googling them reveals nothing but this bike rack design. I’m guessing that they were hobbyists rather than a big design outfit (given the fees involved), and didn’t manage to bootstrap this to broader acclaim?
Anyway - competition oddities aside, it’s a great looking bike rack. More interesting than regular Sheffield stands, but apparently still quite functional.5 And the design is almost perfectly suited to fit the TfL/London tube Roundel iconography, should any British transport designers wish to import it here.
(While the hoop rack was the predominant design in New York, I did see various other styles of rack throughout the city.)
Cars
One reason to prefer cycling to driving is that car traffic is generally very slow. The speed limit in central Manhattan is usually 25mph, and you would be lucky to hit that. The large number of crossroads/intersections means a lot of waiting is involved.
Another reason to prefer cycling is that the cars in New York are remarkably scratched, dinged, and scruffed up. If ever I see a dented/scraped car in the UK, I generally try to give them a wide berth on the assumption that the driver might be dangerously incompetent. That would be impossible in New York, given that every fourth car or so had some kind of scrape. Scenes like this were very common:
One solution to this problem is to add some kind of rear protection to one’s car:
But a ‘Bumper Badger’ is no match for a car approaching at a slightly different angle:
While bumper protectors are purely defensive, another solution is to add various protuberant metal bars to the front and rear of the car, and go on the offensive. A third solution is just to get a much more massive car than whoever might bump into you. Both options proved popular. Both are also antisocial defect/defect solutions to the dilemma of American driving. A metal bar for a metal bar leaves the whole of New York City’s cars scratched.
Americans really have very little excuse for this amount of car-on-car contact: the roads have ample width even for their enormous GMC monstrosities.
One explanation for all the collisions might be the rampant phone use while driving. While phone use while driving is sadly common in the UK, people at least tend to be discrete about it, given the very real potential for a hefty fine and points on one’s licence. But in New York it was blatant. My taxi driver from the airport used two phones simultaneously (!), casually texting as he drove his behemoth vehicle at 40mph. I first assumed that phone use may not (yet) be illegal in New York, but apparently it has been banned since 2001 - the first US state to do so. It seems that enforcement is just very lax.
A second explanation may be that it’s easy to evade the law in general. A very large number of cars had no front licence plate:
This was so common that I assumed that only rear plates were required. Nope. Once again, this is apparently quite illegal. (Perhaps they removed them just to park, eg to prevent theft, but would put them back on when driving? But that would still violate the law in question, and I saw plenty of cars being driven without front licence plates.)
The absence of law enforcement for minor offences is a theme we’ll return to, but the lack of respect for the police extended to emergency services. In the UK, people will generally try to get out of the way of emergency service vehicles whenever they can. (This Youtube channel of an emergency responder illustrates well.) In New York, cars would only sometimes and lazily make way for emergency vehicles (which, in fairness, rarely seemed to be in much of a rush themselves).)6
Ending this segment on a happier note, check out these interesting vertical car parks:
I struggled to figure out how the cars got in and out, but it seems like the bays carousel around. Also, this kind of system apparently dates back to the 1930s!
Finally, here’s a car with a cone on it (not the only one I saw):
Scooters/motorbikes
Yes, more transportation!
Scooters are a common sight in any major city, driven mostly by food delivery drivers. By far the most common brand of scooter I saw was Fly Wing, which I’d never heard of before:
Apparently this is a local New York company selling rebadged generic Chinese bikes. The petrol (gas) versions come in either 50cc or 150cc variants, and are extremely cheap: $1800 (£1430) for an entry-level 150cc model. (By contrast, the main Chinese bike own-brander in the UK is Lexmoto, which sells their entry-level 125cc scooter for £2000 ($2500).)
By far the best-selling scooter in the UK, beloved of delivery drivers, is Honda’s PCX (£3600/125cc in the UK; $4150/160cc in the US).7 The conventional wisdom is that Japanese bikes like Hondas and Suzukis are far more reliable and last longer than the cheaper Chinese imitators, and that this works out cheaper in the long-run for professional users. While Chinese bike sellers in the UK claim near-parity quality with Japanese bikes (which are rarely actually made in Japan these days), the UK market clearly disagrees. Lexmoto’s main market is new learners who use and abuse their cheap Chinese bikes before upgrading to something better when they can afford to do so.
What explains New York’s embrace of Chinese bikes, in contradistinction to the UK? Is it just because the price differential is greater? Are Chinese bikes more reliable in the US than in the UK? Do New Yorkers care less about reliability? Is theft/weather damage relatively more prevalent, such that more expensive bikes are not worth it? Are there regulatory differences? Unclear.
When it comes to full motorcycles, New Yorkers predictably preferred Harley-Davidsons to other brands, but I saw a fair few Japanese sportsbikes, and a good number of Triumphs too, including the exceptionally beefy Rocket 3:
Returning to the scofflaw theme, my week of observations led me to believe that helmets were optional in New York, and that filtering (lane splitting) was legal (which would make sense, given the wide streets and low traffic speed). But, you guessed it: nope on both counts. Just a lot of a lawbreaking.8
Buses
Enough of personal vehicles, what about public transit?
New York buses are great. They’re roomy, air-conditioned, quick to tap on, cheap ($2.75, with free hopper fares), they have usb charging, and, unlike the subway, you get to watch the city pass by as you travel.
The problem is that they’re slow and unreliable. New York has few dedicated bus lanes, so they get held up in traffic. And the posted times are rough guesses at best. (This would be much ameliorated by the live bus times website/app, but I didn’t generally have internet while out and about.) Perhaps for this reason, and perhaps due to a social/class dimension, the buses I rode on had low utilization, and generally seemed to attract only poorer residents. (Compare the buses in London or Cambridge, which are generally packed with a healthy cross-section of society.)
Subway
The subway is a similar story. The fares are the same flat $2.75, regardless of end destination. The trains themselves are roomy, air conditioned, and generally pleasant enough.
But, at least compared with London, trains arrive sufficiently infrequently as to be annoying, and the station and track layout/design is much harder to understand for beginners. Different station entrances will take you to different platforms. The layout can be labyrinthine. Different services on one line are distinguished by bare letters/numbers, rather than conveniently colour-coded and memorable names like in London. The station names can be tricky to see when the train is stopped. Sometimes entrances won’t even mention certain lines that Google (correctly) insists pass through there. And the system maps are generally placed on electronic billboards which periodically change to display adverts rather than the crucial route information you were looking for. As with the buses, having an internet-connection seems like a prerequisite to having an easy time with public transit. (Fair enough, I suppose.)
Circling back to fares: rides on both buses and the subway are just $2.75, regardless of journey length, and permit ‘hopping’ to a new service (for free) within an hour. And fares are capped after 12 journeys/$34 in a week (cumulative between buses and subway).
Compare London, where fares are stratified by location and time. Fares start at £2.70 for off-peak journeys within the central Zone 1 area, but rise to £5.60 for peak-time journeys between Zones 1 and 6. The weekly fare cap for the full Zone 1-6 area is £74.40, or $94.
How can NY public transit be so much cheaper than the London version? Trick question: it’s not. Instead, a far higher percentage of their operating budget comes from taxation rather than fares:
Fare make up only about a 25% of the MTA budget, but 70% of the TFL budget.
In terms of both fairness and efficiency, the US system looks worse to me. It doesn’t seem fair to make local residents bear the burden of running a system they may not even use, and to subsidise tourists. And it doesn’t seem efficient to subsidise fares to such a degree that they become distortionary. If our concern is to make public transit more affordable for those who cannot afford it, then better price discrimination and/or (perhaps targeted) subsidies would be a more sensible direction overall. (Indeed, there already exist such programmes.) But this is no doubt discussed to death elsewhere, so I’ll leave it there.
One final piece of scofflawry: the subway had virtually no official presence, with only some stations having perhaps one worker behind a screen. Anecdotally, fare evasion is rife. At one station a local guy helpfully offered me directions before proceeding to offer a discounted fare of just $1, via the gate he was holding open. I politely declined.
Trains
I didn’t take any non-subway trains, but did visit Grand Central Station. It was indeed a grand, central, station:
While I’m a big fan of making public buildings beautiful, this does have one drawback: Grand Central is so impressive that it draws large crowds of tourists, which in turn makes it less functional qua train station. So perhaps public buildings should not be too beautiful and impressive.9
Miscellaneous
Steam
Manhattan has a steam network, akin to gas or electricity, run by Consolidated Edison. Steam is produced in local plants towards the south of Manhattan, then pumped up the island and into buildings via a 100+ mile-long pipe system. Pipes sometimes leak, which spews out hot steam into the streets. (It’s transported at 230C+). To prevent this harming anyone, they plonk down big orange chimney stacks in the street. (Once replaced by miniature houses with chimneys by a guerrilla artist.)
While a steam network is awesome, I’m assuming that it’s not as practical as other solutions - but I can’t tell why from a quick Google. If anything, the first hits all emphasise how clean and efficient steam is. Plus district heating may be making a comeback: it’s included in Cambridge’s newest quarter, Eddington.10
Why are the bridges so long?
If you want to walk across the Thames in London, you head to the point at which you want to cross the river, and then walk over the relevant bridge. Pretty simple.
Not so in New York. Say you want to cross Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn. If you head to where the bridge intersects the land, you will be nowhere near the entrance to the bridge. The bridge entrance is set back over 600 metres from the edge of the river.
This is true of basically all the bridges I saw. The Williamsburg bridge on the Manhattan side encroaches onto land almost a kilometre! Why?
My best guess is that the bridges need to be high (to allow through large boats), but the incline cannot be too steep for some reason (safety? trains?), resulting in very long bridges with very gradual gradients. I’d be interested to find out whether this is true or not.11
Too much democracy
In the UK you vote for a Member of Parliament (general elections) and your local councillors (local elections). And that’s about it, unless you live in a devolved region or a major city with elected mayors or other recent innovations. This is probably for the best. General elections get 60-70% turnouts, while local elections only get 30-40% turnouts. People (rationally!) don’t know enough or care enough to vote on a much more fine-grained basis than this, and it shows in the turnout.
I’m therefore sceptical of the wisdom of having elections for twenty different candidates / policies / positions at once, as is often done in the US. (See, eg Scott Alexander’s California Ballot posts.12) New York seems to be afflicted by too much democracy. There seem to be elections for a bewildering range of different levels of government and positions. A civically-minded person would be voting at the levels of the nation (president), state (senator, representative), city (mayor, more representatives), borough (more mayors and others), and perhaps volunteering for their local community board. It sounds exhausting and rife with nepotism.
Naming rights
In a British university you might find the Professor of History lecturing in Lecture Hall 1. In an American university you’re more likely to find the John D and Barbara F Thompson and Family Distinguished Professor of History lecturing in the R Johnson Ray III Lecture Hall.
Rich people give money to worthy causes, and in return they get the ego boost of slapping their name on stuff. It’s a win-win. While Americans seem to accept this deal as part and parcel of the philanthropic wheelhouse, in the UK it is only dubiously legal for charities to promise naming rights in return for philanthropic contributions. (At least while claiming gift aid on the donation.) While UK charities are increasingly Americanising (witness the rise of donor-named buildings in UK universities), it still remains a bit of a culture shock to find every civic offering coming with a string of names attached. It’s just not very subtle, guys.
Perv busters
Civic contributions didn’t always take the form of a bag of cash. I saw a lot of well-meaning privately-funded/operated informational campaigns and other forms of public-spiritedness. One intriguing example was a sign advertising the ‘Guardian Angels’, a ‘volunteer Subway and Street Patrol’ who ‘DARE TO CARE!’
At first I thought this was a pastiche (the illuminati eye? really?), but it seems like it’s a real organisation with a real website advertising their various programmes, including ‘Perv busting’. They have a natty uniform comprising a red bomber jacket and red beret.
I would be entirely unsurprised if they turned out to be some kind of proscribed organisation, but I do hope that they’re all just good eggs.
Electrical safety
UK electrical safety regulations dictate that bathrooms cannot contain regular plug sockets (only those shaver ones), and that light switches must be on pull-cords. New build homes often take this one step further, and place the light switch outside the bathroom itself. Whoever thought this was a good idea has presumably never interacted with children, who will inevitably mess with their siblings/friends by plunging them into darkness at an inconvenient time.
New Yorkers just installs their unsafe-at-the-best-of-times plugs directly next to sinks. The land of the free.
I’m always talking about New York City, not New York State.
I only visited for a week, and spent three days at a conference, so I have no pretensions as to thoroughness.
To illustrate the skew: if you start at 1st Avenue (at the furthest western side of Manhattan) where it intersects (East) 50th Street and travelled due west as the crow flies until 11th Avenue (at the furthest eastern side), then you would hit (West) 33rd Street.
One day I was walking towards One WTC, and it felt like I was ‘almost there’ for about 30 minutes: the massive building loomed as if it were close, even at a significant distance.
The original promo shots showed each hoop seamlessly resting on the ground via no apparent connection. The prototype showed a narrow connecting point, which resulted in security concerns. The racks as deployed are connected via a much heftier ground plate with four screws. And, unlike U/Sheffield stands, pulling out the stand won’t free the bike - it’ll remain attached to the hoop.
The emergency vehicle sirens, at at sub-maximum settings, have an almost playful ‘boop-boop’ tone, which I’d never heard in films before, and much gentler than UK ‘waaaaah waaaah’ sirens. Apparently this was a recent switch to a more ‘European’ siren.
Most British scooters top out at 125cc because that allows them to be ridden without a licence, merely a 1-day/£125ish ‘Compulsory Basic Training’ course (and L plates). While the CBT must be renewed every 2 years, that remains cheaper than getting a full licence. ‘Direct access’ (full licence) courses generally cost around £1500, take about seven 3-hour training sessions, require the rider to be 24+, and they still have to actually pass a test at the end of it. By contrast, you will receive the CBT providing that you can perform very basic exercises (and I’ve seen some unscrupulous providers happy to sign the form for repeat delivery drivers, without actually forcing them to re-do the training).
They also had the usual cretins revving the balls off their outrageously over-loud pipes at night in the middle of Manhattan within earshot of about 40,000 people, but I’m guessing that this will at least constitute a nuisance, if not some further misdemeanours.
With that said, St Pancras is quite beautiful, and I’ve never seen swathes of tourists taking photos there like I did in Grand Central. Likewise, pictures of Moscow’s famously beautiful underground stations don’t generally reveal a lot of crowding.
I was informed of the steam system by a local engineer with the coolest-sounding job I’d ever heard of: going into older New York buildings, often with crazy plant rooms, figuring out how to make them more energy efficient, then getting paid to implement those efficiencies out of the energy savings accrued (via an nifty bond system). (Thanks Andrew!)
There were also no steps to reach the bridge from a more oblique angle, as is typical in London, but only ramps (which joined roughly were cars do). This is perhaps for antidiscrimination reasons (?), but it seems silly not to include both.
(I realise that California is an outlier even within the US.)