Getting from LGA to Manhattan and other New York City, NY Transportation Tips

'Mode': TO
Category: Other
Getting TO/AROUND: There are probably cheaper ways of getting from LaGuardia (LGA) airport to Manhattan but none are easier than hopping into a cab.

I arrived on a Saturday morning when there was very little traffic and the ride was very quick, probably less than 20 minutes. I ended up paying $35 for the ride, the meter was $28, $4 for the toll and a tip.

There was a short queue outside the terminal, you'll be handed a fact sheet on taxi fares from LGA so that you won't get ripped off and have an idea of the fare.

Other options include hiring a car service which will be more expensive, Super Shuttle which will be cheaper if there is only one person traveling but almost assuredly will take longer as they stop at multiple hotels.

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'Mode': TO
Category: Other
Getting TO/AROUND: My flight was leaving at 6 pm from Newark so I knew that I would be hitting some rush hour traffic and that the cab ride would be expensive so I called the morning I was leaving and booked the Super Shuttle, a shared van service to the airports.

They gave me a 15 minute window for a pickup time, when it got to be 15 minutes past that, I called and was told they were just minutes away. When they finally showed up 20-25 minutes after the 15 minute window, they still had another pickup and then we started the long rush hour journey to the airport. We arrived with about 50 minutes to spare for my flight but one of the other passengers had less than a 1/2 hour and probably didn't make her flight.

I'm not sure if this is a normal experience with Super Shuttle, certainly traffic on this particular day was no worse than typical rush hour and they should allow for that.

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'Mode': AROUND
Category: Other
Getting TO/AROUND: Coming from Chicago where 8 blocks=mile, I initially misjudged the distance between my destinations. Approximately 20 north-south blocks=mile (eg 20th to 40th Street) and 10 east-west blocks=mile.

Once you get above Greenwich Village, Manhattan is laid out in a grid (like Chicago), with numbered streets running east-west and numbered avenues running north-south. The avenues are a little trickier than streets, Lexington, Park and Madison are tossed in between 3rd and 5th Avenue (and what happened to 4th?) and some develop names around Central Park.

I found the attached website that tries to explain the numbering system, the top part of it seems much too complicated for the average visitor, if you are looking for an address, get the cross street and you should be fine.

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Website: http://www.bigapplevisitorscenter.com/gakmsts.htm

'Mode': AROUND
Category: Subway/Metro
Getting TO/AROUND: I really enjoy walking so I've only taken the subway a couple of times before this trip but since I was walking around in an aircast, I eventually gave in and we bought 1 day Metro fun passes for $7 each.

When traveling around Manhattan, what's important to know are a few things. The first and most important is whether you are going uptown (north) or downtown (south) of where you currently are. Uptown/downtown are NOT specific parts of the city but what direction you are heading in. The 2nd is to look and see if the trains are express or local, if they are express they will be quicker but possibly not stop where you need to go. 3rd, it's important to know what line you want, the map in my guidebook was really hard to read, see if you can get a full size transit map.

The fare machines at the subway stations are terrible to use, the one we used didn't take cash, didn't print receipts, only read our credit cards if you held them in for a certain amount of time and most annoyingly only let us buy one at a time, even more annoying for the guy behind us as we had to buy 6 cards.

On a warm summer day, most of the stations were dreadfully hot, it was a relief when the trains came and at least pushed a little air through the station, even if it smelled.

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Website: http://www.mta.info/

'Mode': TO
Category: Train
Getting TO/AROUND: Since we were just coming in for the day from the Philadelphia area, we decided not to drive and took the New Jersey Transit instead. It took about 1 1/2 hours from Trenton NJ to New York's Penn Station, the train ride was comfortable. It was $21.50 off peak for the adults, $10.75 for children so it probably didn't save us any money but it did alleviate the stress of driving into the traffic mess of New York City.

A note about the Trenton train station, at night it becomes a little scary and the parking garage we were in closed it's main gate so I opted to wait near the station for them to pick me up since I had overdid it walking in my cast. No sooner than the rest of my family disappeared out of sight did someone approach me with the "my car is out of gas and I need a few bucks" story, he was polite and didn't come too close to me but it unsettled me all the same until a squad car arrived.

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Website: http://www.njtransit.com/