* planned work every weekend and most late weeknights which reroutes half the trains and is described in terms guaranteed to confuse visitors. A complete map of the changed routes would help massively; instead, you get a long list of textual descriptions such as "Brooklyn-bound F trains are running express on the E track between Court Sq and W 4th St and local on the D track to Stillwell Av" which scares and confuses tourists who barely understand downtown Manhattan geography, much less how it relates to the rest of the city.
* occasional unreliability at any time of the day, typically either due to signal failures in century-old analog wiring, or because of paramedics or cops shutting down an entire station to take care of a rowdy or injured passenger.
Locals have learned to adapt. They know what the cryptic planned work descriptions mean and in which situations next station alerts are lying. They have learned to understand the static-y conductor announcements on a loud train. They know that on some lines, if you must to be at your destination on time, you ought to leave 30 minutes early just in case this ride is the 1/20 when something happens.
Visitors don't know such things, and I can empathize with their apprehension.
What line are you describing? I take the L every day from downtown around 5 and I can reliably get on the first train and it will arrive in < 10 minutes (and there's a good chance I'll have a seat). If a train takes more than 10 minutes, it will almost certainly be packed full, but it will also almost certainly be followed by another nearly-empty train in ~1-2 minutes.
Which is admittedly the worst scenario that I could think of, and I should have said that. It gets better quickly from there. I used to get on 2 stops further south, and, yeah, at 5 I usually had no problems and a decent chance of getting a seat, too.
Now UIC Halsted, you're very likely to get a seat, not always though.
We were both talking about 5PM.
> Also he was talking about C&L.
I had no way of knowing this when I wrote my post. :)
Unless it was on the weekend when there are a multitude of service interruptions and station closures.
Usually when public transit networks start showing strain, it's during rush hours, when they're handling massive spikes in ridership. To give an example from Chicago: If you're trying to get on the train downtown at 6:00pm, you'll get on the next train, and probably get to sit in a seat. If you try to do it at 5:00pm, you stand a good chance of waiting 30 minutes for a train that you can even physically get on to. When you do, your ride will probably also take 50% longer than the 6pm ride would have. And maybe even 100% longer than a ride at 7pm would have.
You naturally get all the complaints from the rush hour riders. And yeah, if your concert were starting at 6 in the evening so that you'd have to brave rush hour traffic, then that would be a problem. But so would driving.
If, like most concerts, it was starting a bit later, you'd very likely have experienced smooth service.