100 ideas to slightly improve your travel experience: #28 Subways

In many major world cities, subway trains are often the best way to get around the city, for any distance to far to walk.  Don't try to drive in New York, London, Boston, Paris, Chicago, Rome, or Washington DC, traffic is almost always terrible, parking is hard to find and can be incredibly expensive. 

A few tips on how the systems work. 

Find where you are on the system map, and where you want to go.  Identify what line(s) run there, and in that direction. Most systems identify the direction of travel by the station at the end of that trains route.  Where I live, if I want to go into Washington DC, I find my nearest station Huntington on the map, and then look into the city on the map and find that the Yellow line will take me in ending at Mt Vernon Square, or along the way I can change to the Blue line in the direction of Largo - it crosses the city in a different direction.  So I want a Yellow to Mt Vernon Square or go in a couple of stations and I can change to a Blue in the direction of Largo and those will take me into the City.  It take a couple of tries, but once you get used to it, it is a fairly simple system.  

Not if, but when, you get on a train going in the wrong direction, go the the next station, get off, and get on a train going in the other direction. Don't panic, it will add a few minutes to your trip but you will get there.  It happens to all of us sooner or later. 

In some of the older systems, there are separate stations for trains traveling in different directions, so in New York if I want the #1 line, north or uptown I enter on the east side of the street, if I want it going downtown or south, I enter the station on the west side of the street. If I go in the wrong side, I can't get where I want to go without exiting the station and changing to the other side of the street. 

Increasingly subway systems allow payment with any tap and pay credit or debit card or phone pay system.  Check to see if they do before you buy a fare card.  Some systems have a specific phone app for payment. Almost all have a fare card system.  The cards are generally sold in vending machines in the stations. There is usually a small fee for the card, a dollar or two. Most of the cards are reloadable. The disadvantage of a fare card is you will almost always have a balance on it when you leave the city, and most of the cards expire.  I have seen donation boxes at airport stations where the balance on the cards is passed onto charity.  

In my hometown, the DC Metro Rail system has a smart phone app, and fare cards.  Chicago and New York now accept tap to pay credit or debit cards, and have some kind of smartphone payment available.  I have had a London Oyster card for about 20 years, and the last time I was there I was pleased that it still works.