New York City Flow: Moving Through Manhattan Efficiently

Trains that run north to south on the west side of Manhattan: the 1, 2, 3, A, C, E. Trains that run north to south on the east side: the 4, 5, 6. In the middle, the N, Q, R, and W. The L is the only true crosstown line and it runs at 14th Street. The 7 runs from Times Square east across midtown to Queens. Everything else that looks like a crosstown line is actually a shuttle.

If you understand only that, you already move through the city better than half the tourists. Look at the map and you will notice that Manhattan is really three parallel corridors with two crosstown escape hatches at 14th and 42nd. Every efficient trip in Manhattan uses this structure.

On the numbered lines, the 1, 2 and 3 share tracks. The 2 and 3 are express in Manhattan. The 1 is local. If you are going from 96th Street to Times Square, take the 2 or 3 and save 12 minutes. If you are going from 79th Street to 66th Street, take the 1 because the express does not stop at either.

The 4, 5 and 6 work the same way. The 4 and 5 are express in Manhattan. The 6 is local. The most common New York subway mistake is boarding an express thinking it is a local, missing the stop, and adding twenty minutes to the day.

Crossing Manhattan east to west is where the transit system fails visitors. The M14, M23, M34, M42, M50, M57, M79, M86 and M96 buses are all crosstown routes. They exist and they are usable but they are slow because Manhattan traffic is slow. For any crosstown trip under fifteen blocks, walking is faster.

The exception is 42nd Street. The S train, called the 42nd Street Shuttle, runs from Grand Central to Times Square in 90 seconds. Use it. It is one of the few times the subway does exactly what you want it to.

The yellow cab is still the cheapest short trip in central Manhattan for a solo rider, especially in evening traffic when Uber's surge pricing lifts fares by 40 percent. Cabs can be hailed anywhere south of 96th Street on the avenues. The trick is to stand on the side of the street matching the direction you want to go.

For any trip between 34th and 59th street during daytime hours, walking is often faster than any wheeled option. Times Square to Grand Central is 12 minutes on foot. In a car, on a Tuesday at 17:00, that same trip is 25 minutes and 22 dollars.

The rule is to stay on one side of the island as long as possible. Morning on the Upper East Side, museums along Fifth Avenue, then walk across Central Park at the transverse road at 79th Street, then afternoon on the Upper West Side. Or start downtown at Battery Park, work up through Tribeca, SoHo, and Greenwich Village, and then take the L at 14th over to the East Village for dinner. Never bounce between east and west more than twice in a day.

Downtown is more forgiving than midtown because the grid breaks down and the neighborhoods are smaller. In midtown, the vertical avenues and horizontal streets are so long that missing the correct block adds real time.

For planning purposes, assume any subway trip in Manhattan takes 30 minutes from door to door. It probably takes 22 minutes on the train, but there is a walk to the station, a wait for the train, a wait between express and local, and a walk at the other end. Building this buffer into the day is the single most useful adjustment a visitor can make to New York plans.