Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/28/the-great-new-york-bus-tour-battle.html
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Not the first or last NYC turf war
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Just do what I do when I visit NYC, buy a 7 day unlimited transit pass for $34. Why tourists pay for these bus lines and then have to tip every time they set foot off the bus is beyond me. NYC has one of the best transit systems in the world, it’s part of the experience.
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I imagine most tourists are using the buses as a sight-seeing excursion and are relying on the driver for information as much as travel.
Next time you’re in NYC check out the new OMNY system. You can still buy a Metrocard the old fashioned way, including unlimited, but OMNY works with your phone’s tap-to-pay system and adjusts the billing based on frequency of the ride. So if you ride more than 12 times in a 7-day span, it only bills you for the Unlimited fare, but just regular fare if you don’t hit that threshold. Transfers are automatically included and it recognizes transfers from one system to the next (ie bus to subway). I haven’t lived there in a while, so it’s very nice not to have to stand in line and mess with the Metrocard kiosks to reload them and check balances. I also probably have about $20 in Metrocards laying around from various trips to the city that I’ll never get back.
ETA: Oh! And you don’t have to pay the $1 fee for the physical card.
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Yes, public transit in NYC is great. I think it’s nuts to visit NYC without at least trying the subway, and public transit is generally the best way to get around for most people.
But for first time visitors who want to see the major tourist sites and may only spend a few days in the city in their entire lives, the tourist buses still make a ton of sense. They’re crazy expensive (like $60-100 per person for just one day) but the routes are designed to cover most of the major tourist sites that visitors want to see so you don’t have to plan the route yourself, there are guides on the buses who narrate as you go so you know what you’re seeing, and the buses are physically designed to make it easy to see things as you travel around the city (you can’t see anything from a subway tunnel).
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My advice for tourists when I lived there was to avoid the bus tours. The better option for an overview is the Circle Line cruise combined with a visit to the observation deck of one of the midtown skyscrapers. Add in a walking tour focused on the city’s history (Big Onion has several), take the Staten Island ferry past the Statue of Liberty, ride the subway, visit Central Park and the first-time tourist has a great experience at a reasonable price.
This agreement included explicit directions to not physically assault competitors and guidance around smack talk, which was also rampant among ticket sellers.
I assume that the NYC classic “fck you, ya fckin’ f*ck” is still allowed.
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What, these companies sell Ice Cream from their vans? Rookie mistake.
I hope that this NY struggle doesn’t result in death, like the Glasgow version.
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Honestly I kind of used to look down on them also, I think NYC was my first one. It was great. Particularly for the urban canyons in Manhattan seeing them from the second story of a topless bus was a great experience.
Here’s my other tip on busses. The NYC subway is a great system but for a tourist it has one disadvantage: you can’t see the city from the windows. Don’t sleep on the regular busses: you can watch the city go by.
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Oh, you don’t mess with the New York Ice Cream guys. A baseball bat in every truck.
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Yes. I often do that when visiting other cities (take the buses instead of the subway so you can see the streetscape as you go places).
In NYC most bus routes aren’t all that scenic, but here are a few I’d recommend to tourists:
- Southbound M4 from where it starts at the Cloisters all the way up in Inwood, down through Washington Heights and Harlem, and then across Central Park North and down Fifth Ave for the full length of Central Park.
- Southbound M104 from Columbia U (116th and Broadway) down Broadway through the Upper West Side, passing Lincoln Center and Columbus Circle and then down 7th Ave through the heart of Times Square.
- M8 in either direction cutting through the hearts of the East Village, Greenwich Village, and West Village.
A great idea that seems to have died about 10 years ago was the “history bus” app, which was going to provide information about historical sites along bus routes so tourists and locals alike could learn about history while taking the bus. I had their inaugural app for the M22 bus installed on my phone for a while, but never got around to actually trying it before an iOS upgrade broke it.
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My buddy’s son is visiting from NM and this is exactly what I told him. He loved it! Since he’s still a minor I did not tell him the other great part of the SI Ferry; they serve beer! Nothing better than sitting on the gunwale benches with a cold one and watching the lovely lady just slide on by.
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