How do I get around New York?

New York's subway is the backbone. 472 stations, 24-hour service, a flat $2.90 fare regardless of distance. OMNY (the contactless tap system) works with any phone wallet or bank card that has the tap symbol, and it caps your weekly spending at $34.00. That's the same price as the old 7-day unlimited MetroCard, which still exists if you prefer plastic but requires standing in line at a vending machine that hasn't been redesigned since 2003. Download CityMapper or the MTA app before you land; the real-time arrival data is accurate within a minute on most lines. Weekend service changes are the one consistent headache: the MTA reroutes and suspends lines for track work, and the posted signs at stations are often wrong or missing. Check the app Saturday morning before heading out. The 1, 2, 3 and 4, 5, 6 trains run Manhattan's spine, the L crosses into Williamsburg, the 7 reaches Flushing. Learn those five and you've covered 80% of what a visitor needs.

Manhattan below 60th Street is a walking city. The grid makes navigation dead simple once you know the trick: avenues run north-south, streets run east-west, and building numbers reset at Fifth Avenue, which divides East from West. Walk from the East Village to SoHo in twelve minutes. Walk the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn when the wooden planks are still damp and the commuter cyclists haven't started racing through yet. Walk the High Line from Gansevoort Street north: the old steel rails still visible under your feet, the smell of wild grasses sharp in the Chelsea section where the plantings go half-feral. You will walk more than you expect. Comfortable shoes matter more than any other packing decision you make. The subway gets you across town; your feet handle the last half-mile in every direction.

Yellow cabs are still everywhere in Manhattan: $3.00 drop, roughly $0.70 per fifth of a mile, with surcharges that add $1.00 to $2.50 during rush hour and late night. In practice, a cab from Penn Station to the Upper East Side runs about $25–30 before tip. Uber and Lyft work fine but tend to cost more than cabs for trips inside Manhattan, once the congestion surcharge kicks in: $2.75 per ridehail trip below 96th Street. Use ridehail for outer-borough trips where yellow cabs thin out. Getting from Bushwick to Astoria at midnight, say. Use cabs for anything in Midtown or below. One tip that saves real money: the NYC Ferry runs $4.00 from Wall Street to DUMBO, Williamsburg, or Astoria, with the skyline sliding past at water level the whole ride. The commuter crowd uses it daily. You should too.

Citi Bike costs $4.49 for a single ride (30-minute window) or $19 for a day pass with unlimited 30-minute classic bike trips. The docking stations blanket Manhattan and inner Brooklyn, and the e-bikes, marked with a lightning bolt icon, are worth the extra cost when you're heading into the wind on the Hudson River Greenway or grinding uphill toward Morningside Heights. Stick to protected bike lanes: the ones on First and Second Avenue, the Hudson River path, the Brooklyn waterfront. Riding in mixed traffic on a crosstown street during rush hour is dangerous and not something to test on vacation. Skip the pedicabs near Central Park: they quote $5 and charge $50. Skip the hop-on-hop-off tour buses; the M1 public bus runs the same route down Fifth Avenue for $2.90. And skip renting a car entirely. Parking alone runs $40–60 a day in a Midtown garage, the streets are hostile to unfamiliar drivers, and the subway goes everywhere you want to be.