Straphangers in Manhattan

An Update on the State of Transit in NYC

It had been a while since I'd taken a pleasure trip to New York City—not since before the pandemic, in fact. I'd gone there on a couple of research trips immediately prior to Covid, but my wife hadn't been particularly interested in vacationing south of the Canadian border when Trump was in the White House, which I understood. In the meantime, though, the legend of the Big Apple has been growing in our children's minds—Times Square! the Statue of Liberty! the Empire State Building!—so we arranged a 48-hour getaway for their spring break. (November is going to be upon us sooner than we think.)

You know me. Driving isn't on the table; as a rule, where there's a train, I try to take it. But the last time I took the Adirondack from Montreal to New York, it took 13 hours—all of them daylight hours. (Taking the train from Montreal to Toronto, which is about the same distance, takes under five hours.) In other words, for two days in Manhattan, you'd have to budget four days in total. In more civilized times, I'm told, a train left from Montreal's Windsor Station at night, and got you into Manhattan the following morning, after a pleasant sleep in a Pullman.

I believe the technical term for the situation, as it exists today, is "idiotic."