June 2, 2026 • 19 mins
Transportopia host Rick L'Amie rides the G and 7 with his daughter Lauren as she describes life as a longtime New York City transit rider. They discuss the quirky G train jog, seasonal shutdowns, and the city’s 24-hour subway that makes car-free living possible.
Lauren reflects on moving from Austin, selling her car, and how transit shapes daily life — from schlepping furniture on the train to mourning the MetroCard as the system moves to OMNY. She also dispels myths about subway safety and urges newcomers: take the train.
SHOW NOTES — REFERENCES & LINKS
The MTA — mta.info (official site, all NYC subway info)
The G train service page the notorious service change closings for 2026— https://www.mta.info/article/service-changes-g-line-2026
OMNY (tap-to-pay) — omny.info (MTA’s contactless fare system)
End of the MetroCard — https://www.mta.info/press-release/mta-partners-iconic-culinary-vendors-celebrate-end-of-metrocard (MTA’s official MetroCard sunset announcement*)
New York City Transit Museum — nytransitmuseum.org (the place to go for token, MetroCard, and subway history)
Austin, Texas
Capital Metro (Cap Metro) — capmetro.org (Austin’s public transit agency)
Cap MetroRail Red Line — capmetro.org/rail (the commuter rail line referenced in the episode)
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(00:00):
and then you'll hear the train coming and you'll look
(00:02):
and it's like way down at the other end.
So to catch it, you have to like sprint.
This year, they deprecated the MetroCard,
which was kind of sad.
I would love to dispel all of the myths
of New York being dangerous and the train being dangerous.
(00:24):
It is perfectly safe.
This is the Transportopia podcast,
featuring engaging and sometimes humorous conversations
about transit's past, present, and future
(00:45):
with the people shaping it every day.
Now, here's Rick Lemie.
Hey, sweet girl.
What's up?
Hi.
Hi.
How was your journey?
It was beautiful.
Okay, good.
Lovely.
Welcome.
(01:06):
That's my daughter, Lauren Lemie.
She lives on the fourth floor of a brownstone
in Brooklyn, New York.
She moved here from Austin, Texas about 10 years ago,
and she is, by my admittedly biased reckoning,
my favorite transit writer in the world.
If you've listened to this show before,
you know I usually sit down with people
who think about transit, planners, journalists, advocates,
(01:28):
and we talk about the systems that move our cities,
but I haven't featured an actual transit writer yet.
So today, we're doing something different.
My guest is the person who actually rides transit every day
to work in one of the only cities in America
where you really can.
The next stop is 4th Avenue, 9th Street.
(01:48):
Stand clear of the closing doors, please.
It's a weekday morning.
Lauren is heading to work, and I'm tagging along with her.
She's an SEO manager at the New York Times.
To get there from Brooklyn, she takes two trains,
the G, then the 7, west across the river into Manhattan.
(02:10):
About 45 minutes door-to-door on a good day.
So we're headed down the Nassau Avenue station
to Line G, right?
Yeah.
So I think I set my phone up to pay.
Yeah, so now we have tap to pay.
Tap, so it does tap.
Yeah, you should be able to just tap.
The G train is the only line in the entire MTA system
(02:30):
that doesn't run into Manhattan.
It runs through Brooklyn and Queens,
connecting them to each other
instead of funneling everyone onto the island.
It's famously short.
Most of the platforms it stops at
were built for longer trains.
So when the G pulls in, sometimes it only stops halfway down.
And so there's this thing that people call the G train jog,
(02:50):
where, because the train stops halfway down the platform,
but there's not a lot of signage that says,
this is where the train stops halfway down the platform.
So you'll enter at one end of the station
and then you'll hear the train coming
and you'll look and it's like way down at the other end.
So to catch it, you have to like sprint.
(03:13):
People will be like, oh, did you have to do the jog?
And you're like, yeah, I didn't make it.
I had to do the jog.
The G also has the unfortunate habit every summer
of just going away for a few weeks.
The MTA shuts it down for what they call signal maintenance.
And it inexplicably takes six weeks
and they have to do it every summer.
And then the train doesn't get better.
(03:35):
So you're like, what were they doing?
That train, the G, the short one, the disappearing one,
the one you have to sprint to
is somehow the train Lauren loves.
This year, they deprecated the MetroCard,
which was kind of sad.
Everyone was a little sad.
It's just like a, it's such an iconic image,
(03:58):
the little yellow and blue card.
The ubiquitous MetroCard,
that yellow and blue striped card
that for nearly 30 years was how you got
on the New York City subway, done as of this spring.
And people, there were like artists
who made art out of the MetroCards.
Like it's such a cute kind of symbol of New York.
(04:18):
I know somebody who has a tattoo of a MetroCard
and they did away with them for this new thing called Omni.
Omni, you tap to pay now.
Your phone, your watch, your contactless card.
Every 12 taps gets you a free ride.
By every metric, except the cultural one, it's an upgrade.
Before the MetroCard, it was tokens,
(04:39):
little coins with cutouts in them
that had a 50 year run from 1953 until 2003.
When the MetroCard killed them, people mourned that one too.
The tokens, the MetroCard to now Omni,
three generations of how you pay
to enter the New York subway.
Lauren's mourning is real, but her perspective is long.
(04:59):
The thing you grew up with is sometimes the most romantic
until something else comes along.
And the people who love that one
start grieving when it goes too.
I asked Lauren what most New Yorkers feel
about their subway.
I mean, there is the New York everybody thinks about,
romanticizes from the films and the songs,
but the rhythm and the heartbeat
(05:21):
is really the transit system.
That's true, that's a very romantic view, dad.
You would have this.
12 minutes after we got off the G,
we surfaced in Times Square.
We are sitting in the New York Times cafeteria
after taking a great train ride.
So I like to ask my guests what they're drinking right now.
(05:43):
What's your beverage while we're chatting?
I am having a water
only because I've already had too much coffee.
And a bagel.
A water and a bagel.
So, and I'm having this rain.
It's a canned water.
You're having special artisanal water.
Artisanal water from the New York Times
because it says here better for you, better for the planet.
(06:05):
And I feel better drinking this water right here.
This is why they call us elitists.
We serve this kind of water.
That's true.
All right, so, you know,
here's my opening question for you.
I was thinking about this
as we were getting ready to do this podcast.
I'd like to ask my guests,
what's your earliest transit memory?
What's your first memory going back
when you thought about using transit, any kind of transit?
(06:29):
Oh man, it's hard because we grew up in Texas
where there isn't a lot.
But my, and probably, oh, this is kind of nice.
It has to do with you because of what your job was.
Like I think when you were working at CapMetro,
being, having an awareness of there even being a bus
(06:49):
because of where we lived in the city,
I don't, I genuinely don't think I would have known
about Austin having bus services that I could use
if you did not work there and explain to me.
There are bus services.
My dad, I used to say that as a kid too,
not really knowing what you did.
Like my dad builds the trains.
(07:11):
My dad built the train.
That's right.
And then people were like, what?
Really?
Are you sure?
Brief context here.
I used to work as the VP of marketing at CapMetro,
the public transit agency in Austin, Texas.
Lauren happened to know Austin had a bus system
because her father came home from work
talking about it.
(07:32):
By the time Lauren was 22
and a graduate of the University of Texas,
she was getting on a plane, not a train,
this time to leave.
I needed to go.
I was like, I had always wanted to live in New York
since I was 12.
And I came here on like a middle school field trip.
(07:53):
And then I studied journalism
and it kind of just made sense.
This is where all the jobs were,
all the big media companies that I wanted to work for
required me to be here.
And so it just kind of made sense.
The move from Austin to New York is statistically a move
from a place where almost no one rides transit
to one of the only places in America
(08:15):
where almost everyone does.
For most people, the car question is a calculation.
For Lauren.
It wasn't that I was like, I hate my car.
I'm ready to move.
I'm ready to move.
I wasn't like, I hate my car.
I'm ready to be rid of my car.
But being here, it just doesn't make sense to maintain it.
Like, because the system is so efficient
(08:37):
at getting you places.
When she moved, we sold her car.
He had a name.
It was Herman.
Herman was a 1998 Honda CRV.
And Lauren was just four years his senior.
He outlived his usefulness
the moment she landed in New York.
I sold it for her later.
She has not owned a car since.
How long did it take for you to feel like
(08:58):
you really knew the transit system
and the subways after you moved?
I think it took me like three or four years
of navigating regularly
and just going to enough parts of the city
to where I understood where each train goes and does not go.
Three to four years to functional New York subway fluency.
(09:18):
So you really have to kind of be brave a little bit, right?
Just to navigate something like that.
The fears that sometimes come with riding the subway.
How did you deal with that?
I feel like I'm going to be a bad guest in this regard
because I was never scared of taking the train.
Many people who don't live in New York
are convinced the New York City subway is a dangerous place.
(09:41):
They're wrong.
It is statistically very safe.
There's a lot of, like,
the subway is dangerous propaganda
that I think has existed back from a time
when it actually was.
Like, throughout the 80s and 90s, it was not a great...
It was actually kind of dangerous
to take the train alone as a woman,
(10:04):
but it's just really not like that.
I would love to dispel all of the myths
of New York being dangerous and the train being dangerous.
It is perfectly safe.
Like, bad things happen on it sometimes,
but in a million different...
(10:25):
Like, that's one in, like, a million train rides
and a million riders, and, like, you know?
I'm like, that's not a thing that happens all the time,
but there'll be, like, some horrible headlines
about someone getting knifed on the train.
It does happen, but, like, it's so rare.
I am, I will admit, a dad.
(10:46):
I worry.
Lauren gets texts from me when there's a horrible headline.
I usually arrive before she's seen the headlines.
They say things like, Lauren, question mark?
She always replies the same way.
And I'm like, I'm fine, I'm in Brooklyn.
It's usually, like, I'm good.
Bad things do happen on subways.
Bad things happen in every form of human transportation.
(11:09):
They happen in cars more often.
The train's not the danger.
The train is the city.
Let's talk a little bit about MTA.
What do you think MTA is doing right these days?
Well, the good thing is that it still is a,
like, a 24-hour system.
(11:29):
Like, for the most part, at any point in the day or night,
I can find my way home.
Most subway systems in the world shut down
for several hours overnight.
London, Paris, Tokyo.
New York doesn't.
New York runs all night.
Less frequently, but it runs.
Leave a bar at 3 in the morning and get home on a train.
(11:51):
In most cities, you cannot do that.
MTA does a lot of things right, but it does many things wrong.
You've already heard part of this.
The G train shutdowns.
Lauren has more.
During, like, rush hour weekdays,
it'll come, like, every 5 to 10 minutes, which is pretty good.
But then on the weekends, a lot of times it's like,
(12:14):
you'll catch a G and then the next one's not for 25 minutes.
So I want them to make it more frequent,
which I guess means fixing some of the signal stuff.
And then it's also a short train,
but for some reason, all of our platforms are long.
My other complaint is I'm like, just make it longer.
Just add some more cars and it would, like, be life-changing.
(12:38):
We talked about a lot of things.
We talked about furniture.
We bought our table.
It's, like, from West Elm, and we were like,
that's so expensive to just buy from West Elm.
So we were like, we can buy each one of the matching chairs.
We wanted the four matching chairs,
and we found them all individually
on Facebook Marketplace.
(12:58):
And then we carried them each home, like, on the train.
One at a time on the G train through Brooklyn.
There's a word for this.
Lauren taught it to me.
It is schlep, to carry with effort.
New Yorkers schlep all the time.
They schlep groceries.
They schlep laundry.
They schlep four West Elm dining chairs,
(13:20):
one by one, until they have a set.
It's schlepping.
It's, like, schlep culture.
That's a thing.
I schlep it.
You're schlepping, and so you can't have
as much stuff with you.
But also, you are just constantly —
people do — I'm realizing people say this a lot.
(13:41):
You are constantly schlepping here.
If you live in a place with a car,
you don't understand the schlep culture.
Your car is your schlepper.
You buy a big thing of paper towels, you bring it home.
If you live in a place without a car,
schlep is a way of life.
You learn what you can carry.
You shop differently.
You own less stuff because you can't carry
more stuff than you can carry.
(14:02):
Does transit make you feel more free
or less free in New York?
Oh, both.
Yeah.
Like, more free in that I don't have to worry
about having a car, and sometimes that's great.
Like, I don't have to park.
I don't have to — I don't have a large machine
(14:24):
with me all the time.
I can go one place and then go another place.
Like, that's cool to be free from having a car
in that sense.
There's certain conveniences that I really
miss about having a car, and I feel restricted by those.
(14:46):
Sometimes, like, grocery shopping
is a time when I am desperate to have my car back.
I hate grocery shopping here.
Both.
The honest answer to almost every question about life
in York is both, free and not free, loud and intimate,
hard and easy, lonely and dense, with people, both.
(15:16):
There is, in New York, a colloquial rule
about when you stop being a transplant.
It is 10 years.
Well, technically, it's supposed to be this year,
because I'm 10 now.
So that's a thing.
10 years, you've earned your stripes.
10 years, you're allowed to say,
I don't know who came up with it.
But it's like, you've been here for 10 years.
(15:37):
You're a New Yorker.
Or you can claim the title.
During the pandemic, I was here through the whole thing.
And a lot of people have been like,
if you stayed through the pandemic, you earned it.
You're good.
You get New Yorker status, even if you
weren't here for 10 years.
If you stayed here from 2020 on, you get extra points.
(16:04):
Lauren was in New York for the whole pandemic,
the bad spring, the empty subway cars,
the sirens that didn't stop.
She stayed.
At both rules, the 10-year rule and the pandemic rule,
she has earned the title.
So maybe after 2021 or something,
I was like, you know what?
Yeah.
(16:24):
All right, let's close up here.
What's your advice?
Somebody is moving to New York.
They're thinking about it.
What would you tell them if they're
thinking about coming to New York and moving there?
Don't be afraid of the train.
Take the train.
It's fine.
I had some people move.
I remember a girl I went to college with moved here
(16:48):
and came from Texas, hadn't lived anywhere else.
And she asked to get coffee with me or something.
And she was living in the Upper West Side.
And I'm in Brooklyn.
And I was like, come meet me at this coffee shop.
And she got there.
And she was in a car.
And I was like, did you take a car all the way here?
(17:09):
And she was like, well, you know,
I was scared to take the train to Brooklyn.
And I was like, that is the craziest thing I have ever
heard.
But I think a lot of people move here and do that.
They'll only live in Manhattan.
And they'll just take cabs everywhere.
That would be my advice.
Don't do that.
You're limiting yourself.
(17:29):
You're also living in like a weird bubble that
makes you look and feel like a transplant.
Real New Yorkers are taking the train everywhere.
Take the train.
That is, I think, this whole episode in three words,
maybe the whole show.
Take the train.
(17:55):
My daughter, Lauren Lemme, lives in Brooklyn, New York.
She rides the G train.
She has been there for 10 years through one pandemic,
which makes her, by every available metric, a New Yorker.
She doesn't own a car.
She doesn't want to.
She knows where the G stops on the platform.
She is, as I said at the beginning,
my favorite transit rider.
(18:15):
Most of America doesn't live the way Lauren lives.
In most American cities, you can't really
get anywhere without a car.
A bus, if there is one, is a rumor to some people,
the thing you've heard about but don't quite trust,
a thing for someone else.
In Lauren's city, transit isn't a rumor.
It's the floor under everything.
It's how you go to work, how you date,
(18:36):
how you bring your four dining chairs home
from Facebook Marketplace one at a time.
It's not for someone else.
It's for everyone.
And that right there is what this show is about,
transportation plus utopia, a state of transportopia,
transit for everyone, not just for the lucky ones
who happen to land somewhere it already works.
(19:00):
If you liked today's episode, do me a favor.
Follow Transportopia wherever you get your podcasts.
Leave us a rating, tell a friend,
and visit transportopia.org for show notes,
photos from the trip, and links to everything
Lauren and I talked about.
And drop us a line while you're there.
I read every message.
I'm Rick Lemme.
Goodbye, everybody.
(19:21):
And remember, take the train.
♪♪
♪♪
(19:49):
♪♪
and then you'll hear the train coming and you'll look
(00:02):
and it's like way down at the other end.
So to catch it, you have to like sprint.
This year, they deprecated the MetroCard,
which was kind of sad.
I would love to dispel all of the myths
of New York being dangerous and the train being dangerous.
(00:24):
It is perfectly safe.
This is the Transportopia podcast,
featuring engaging and sometimes humorous conversations
about transit's past, present, and future
(00:45):
with the people shaping it every day.
Now, here's Rick Lemie.
Hey, sweet girl.
What's up?
Hi.
Hi.
How was your journey?
It was beautiful.
Okay, good.
Lovely.
Welcome.
(01:06):
That's my daughter, Lauren Lemie.
She lives on the fourth floor of a brownstone
in Brooklyn, New York.
She moved here from Austin, Texas about 10 years ago,
and she is, by my admittedly biased reckoning,
my favorite transit writer in the world.
If you've listened to this show before,
you know I usually sit down with people
who think about transit, planners, journalists, advocates,
(01:28):
and we talk about the systems that move our cities,
but I haven't featured an actual transit writer yet.
So today, we're doing something different.
My guest is the person who actually rides transit every day
to work in one of the only cities in America
where you really can.
The next stop is 4th Avenue, 9th Street.
(01:48):
Stand clear of the closing doors, please.
It's a weekday morning.
Lauren is heading to work, and I'm tagging along with her.
She's an SEO manager at the New York Times.
To get there from Brooklyn, she takes two trains,
the G, then the 7, west across the river into Manhattan.
(02:10):
About 45 minutes door-to-door on a good day.
So we're headed down the Nassau Avenue station
to Line G, right?
Yeah.
So I think I set my phone up to pay.
Yeah, so now we have tap to pay.
Tap, so it does tap.
Yeah, you should be able to just tap.
The G train is the only line in the entire MTA system
(02:30):
that doesn't run into Manhattan.
It runs through Brooklyn and Queens,
connecting them to each other
instead of funneling everyone onto the island.
It's famously short.
Most of the platforms it stops at
were built for longer trains.
So when the G pulls in, sometimes it only stops halfway down.
And so there's this thing that people call the G train jog,
(02:50):
where, because the train stops halfway down the platform,
but there's not a lot of signage that says,
this is where the train stops halfway down the platform.
So you'll enter at one end of the station
and then you'll hear the train coming
and you'll look and it's like way down at the other end.
So to catch it, you have to like sprint.
(03:13):
People will be like, oh, did you have to do the jog?
And you're like, yeah, I didn't make it.
I had to do the jog.
The G also has the unfortunate habit every summer
of just going away for a few weeks.
The MTA shuts it down for what they call signal maintenance.
And it inexplicably takes six weeks
and they have to do it every summer.
And then the train doesn't get better.
(03:35):
So you're like, what were they doing?
That train, the G, the short one, the disappearing one,
the one you have to sprint to
is somehow the train Lauren loves.
This year, they deprecated the MetroCard,
which was kind of sad.
Everyone was a little sad.
It's just like a, it's such an iconic image,
(03:58):
the little yellow and blue card.
The ubiquitous MetroCard,
that yellow and blue striped card
that for nearly 30 years was how you got
on the New York City subway, done as of this spring.
And people, there were like artists
who made art out of the MetroCards.
Like it's such a cute kind of symbol of New York.
(04:18):
I know somebody who has a tattoo of a MetroCard
and they did away with them for this new thing called Omni.
Omni, you tap to pay now.
Your phone, your watch, your contactless card.
Every 12 taps gets you a free ride.
By every metric, except the cultural one, it's an upgrade.
Before the MetroCard, it was tokens,
(04:39):
little coins with cutouts in them
that had a 50 year run from 1953 until 2003.
When the MetroCard killed them, people mourned that one too.
The tokens, the MetroCard to now Omni,
three generations of how you pay
to enter the New York subway.
Lauren's mourning is real, but her perspective is long.
(04:59):
The thing you grew up with is sometimes the most romantic
until something else comes along.
And the people who love that one
start grieving when it goes too.
I asked Lauren what most New Yorkers feel
about their subway.
I mean, there is the New York everybody thinks about,
romanticizes from the films and the songs,
but the rhythm and the heartbeat
(05:21):
is really the transit system.
That's true, that's a very romantic view, dad.
You would have this.
12 minutes after we got off the G,
we surfaced in Times Square.
We are sitting in the New York Times cafeteria
after taking a great train ride.
So I like to ask my guests what they're drinking right now.
(05:43):
What's your beverage while we're chatting?
I am having a water
only because I've already had too much coffee.
And a bagel.
A water and a bagel.
So, and I'm having this rain.
It's a canned water.
You're having special artisanal water.
Artisanal water from the New York Times
because it says here better for you, better for the planet.
(06:05):
And I feel better drinking this water right here.
This is why they call us elitists.
We serve this kind of water.
That's true.
All right, so, you know,
here's my opening question for you.
I was thinking about this
as we were getting ready to do this podcast.
I'd like to ask my guests,
what's your earliest transit memory?
What's your first memory going back
when you thought about using transit, any kind of transit?
(06:29):
Oh man, it's hard because we grew up in Texas
where there isn't a lot.
But my, and probably, oh, this is kind of nice.
It has to do with you because of what your job was.
Like I think when you were working at CapMetro,
being, having an awareness of there even being a bus
(06:49):
because of where we lived in the city,
I don't, I genuinely don't think I would have known
about Austin having bus services that I could use
if you did not work there and explain to me.
There are bus services.
My dad, I used to say that as a kid too,
not really knowing what you did.
Like my dad builds the trains.
(07:11):
My dad built the train.
That's right.
And then people were like, what?
Really?
Are you sure?
Brief context here.
I used to work as the VP of marketing at CapMetro,
the public transit agency in Austin, Texas.
Lauren happened to know Austin had a bus system
because her father came home from work
talking about it.
(07:32):
By the time Lauren was 22
and a graduate of the University of Texas,
she was getting on a plane, not a train,
this time to leave.
I needed to go.
I was like, I had always wanted to live in New York
since I was 12.
And I came here on like a middle school field trip.
(07:53):
And then I studied journalism
and it kind of just made sense.
This is where all the jobs were,
all the big media companies that I wanted to work for
required me to be here.
And so it just kind of made sense.
The move from Austin to New York is statistically a move
from a place where almost no one rides transit
to one of the only places in America
(08:15):
where almost everyone does.
For most people, the car question is a calculation.
For Lauren.
It wasn't that I was like, I hate my car.
I'm ready to move.
I'm ready to move.
I wasn't like, I hate my car.
I'm ready to be rid of my car.
But being here, it just doesn't make sense to maintain it.
Like, because the system is so efficient
(08:37):
at getting you places.
When she moved, we sold her car.
He had a name.
It was Herman.
Herman was a 1998 Honda CRV.
And Lauren was just four years his senior.
He outlived his usefulness
the moment she landed in New York.
I sold it for her later.
She has not owned a car since.
How long did it take for you to feel like
(08:58):
you really knew the transit system
and the subways after you moved?
I think it took me like three or four years
of navigating regularly
and just going to enough parts of the city
to where I understood where each train goes and does not go.
Three to four years to functional New York subway fluency.
(09:18):
So you really have to kind of be brave a little bit, right?
Just to navigate something like that.
The fears that sometimes come with riding the subway.
How did you deal with that?
I feel like I'm going to be a bad guest in this regard
because I was never scared of taking the train.
Many people who don't live in New York
are convinced the New York City subway is a dangerous place.
(09:41):
They're wrong.
It is statistically very safe.
There's a lot of, like,
the subway is dangerous propaganda
that I think has existed back from a time
when it actually was.
Like, throughout the 80s and 90s, it was not a great...
It was actually kind of dangerous
to take the train alone as a woman,
(10:04):
but it's just really not like that.
I would love to dispel all of the myths
of New York being dangerous and the train being dangerous.
It is perfectly safe.
Like, bad things happen on it sometimes,
but in a million different...
(10:25):
Like, that's one in, like, a million train rides
and a million riders, and, like, you know?
I'm like, that's not a thing that happens all the time,
but there'll be, like, some horrible headlines
about someone getting knifed on the train.
It does happen, but, like, it's so rare.
I am, I will admit, a dad.
(10:46):
I worry.
Lauren gets texts from me when there's a horrible headline.
I usually arrive before she's seen the headlines.
They say things like, Lauren, question mark?
She always replies the same way.
And I'm like, I'm fine, I'm in Brooklyn.
It's usually, like, I'm good.
Bad things do happen on subways.
Bad things happen in every form of human transportation.
(11:09):
They happen in cars more often.
The train's not the danger.
The train is the city.
Let's talk a little bit about MTA.
What do you think MTA is doing right these days?
Well, the good thing is that it still is a,
like, a 24-hour system.
(11:29):
Like, for the most part, at any point in the day or night,
I can find my way home.
Most subway systems in the world shut down
for several hours overnight.
London, Paris, Tokyo.
New York doesn't.
New York runs all night.
Less frequently, but it runs.
Leave a bar at 3 in the morning and get home on a train.
(11:51):
In most cities, you cannot do that.
MTA does a lot of things right, but it does many things wrong.
You've already heard part of this.
The G train shutdowns.
Lauren has more.
During, like, rush hour weekdays,
it'll come, like, every 5 to 10 minutes, which is pretty good.
But then on the weekends, a lot of times it's like,
(12:14):
you'll catch a G and then the next one's not for 25 minutes.
So I want them to make it more frequent,
which I guess means fixing some of the signal stuff.
And then it's also a short train,
but for some reason, all of our platforms are long.
My other complaint is I'm like, just make it longer.
Just add some more cars and it would, like, be life-changing.
(12:38):
We talked about a lot of things.
We talked about furniture.
We bought our table.
It's, like, from West Elm, and we were like,
that's so expensive to just buy from West Elm.
So we were like, we can buy each one of the matching chairs.
We wanted the four matching chairs,
and we found them all individually
on Facebook Marketplace.
(12:58):
And then we carried them each home, like, on the train.
One at a time on the G train through Brooklyn.
There's a word for this.
Lauren taught it to me.
It is schlep, to carry with effort.
New Yorkers schlep all the time.
They schlep groceries.
They schlep laundry.
They schlep four West Elm dining chairs,
(13:20):
one by one, until they have a set.
It's schlepping.
It's, like, schlep culture.
That's a thing.
I schlep it.
You're schlepping, and so you can't have
as much stuff with you.
But also, you are just constantly —
people do — I'm realizing people say this a lot.
(13:41):
You are constantly schlepping here.
If you live in a place with a car,
you don't understand the schlep culture.
Your car is your schlepper.
You buy a big thing of paper towels, you bring it home.
If you live in a place without a car,
schlep is a way of life.
You learn what you can carry.
You shop differently.
You own less stuff because you can't carry
more stuff than you can carry.
(14:02):
Does transit make you feel more free
or less free in New York?
Oh, both.
Yeah.
Like, more free in that I don't have to worry
about having a car, and sometimes that's great.
Like, I don't have to park.
I don't have to — I don't have a large machine
(14:24):
with me all the time.
I can go one place and then go another place.
Like, that's cool to be free from having a car
in that sense.
There's certain conveniences that I really
miss about having a car, and I feel restricted by those.
(14:46):
Sometimes, like, grocery shopping
is a time when I am desperate to have my car back.
I hate grocery shopping here.
Both.
The honest answer to almost every question about life
in York is both, free and not free, loud and intimate,
hard and easy, lonely and dense, with people, both.
(15:16):
There is, in New York, a colloquial rule
about when you stop being a transplant.
It is 10 years.
Well, technically, it's supposed to be this year,
because I'm 10 now.
So that's a thing.
10 years, you've earned your stripes.
10 years, you're allowed to say,
I don't know who came up with it.
But it's like, you've been here for 10 years.
(15:37):
You're a New Yorker.
Or you can claim the title.
During the pandemic, I was here through the whole thing.
And a lot of people have been like,
if you stayed through the pandemic, you earned it.
You're good.
You get New Yorker status, even if you
weren't here for 10 years.
If you stayed here from 2020 on, you get extra points.
(16:04):
Lauren was in New York for the whole pandemic,
the bad spring, the empty subway cars,
the sirens that didn't stop.
She stayed.
At both rules, the 10-year rule and the pandemic rule,
she has earned the title.
So maybe after 2021 or something,
I was like, you know what?
Yeah.
(16:24):
All right, let's close up here.
What's your advice?
Somebody is moving to New York.
They're thinking about it.
What would you tell them if they're
thinking about coming to New York and moving there?
Don't be afraid of the train.
Take the train.
It's fine.
I had some people move.
I remember a girl I went to college with moved here
(16:48):
and came from Texas, hadn't lived anywhere else.
And she asked to get coffee with me or something.
And she was living in the Upper West Side.
And I'm in Brooklyn.
And I was like, come meet me at this coffee shop.
And she got there.
And she was in a car.
And I was like, did you take a car all the way here?
(17:09):
And she was like, well, you know,
I was scared to take the train to Brooklyn.
And I was like, that is the craziest thing I have ever
heard.
But I think a lot of people move here and do that.
They'll only live in Manhattan.
And they'll just take cabs everywhere.
That would be my advice.
Don't do that.
You're limiting yourself.
(17:29):
You're also living in like a weird bubble that
makes you look and feel like a transplant.
Real New Yorkers are taking the train everywhere.
Take the train.
That is, I think, this whole episode in three words,
maybe the whole show.
Take the train.
(17:55):
My daughter, Lauren Lemme, lives in Brooklyn, New York.
She rides the G train.
She has been there for 10 years through one pandemic,
which makes her, by every available metric, a New Yorker.
She doesn't own a car.
She doesn't want to.
She knows where the G stops on the platform.
She is, as I said at the beginning,
my favorite transit rider.
(18:15):
Most of America doesn't live the way Lauren lives.
In most American cities, you can't really
get anywhere without a car.
A bus, if there is one, is a rumor to some people,
the thing you've heard about but don't quite trust,
a thing for someone else.
In Lauren's city, transit isn't a rumor.
It's the floor under everything.
It's how you go to work, how you date,
(18:36):
how you bring your four dining chairs home
from Facebook Marketplace one at a time.
It's not for someone else.
It's for everyone.
And that right there is what this show is about,
transportation plus utopia, a state of transportopia,
transit for everyone, not just for the lucky ones
who happen to land somewhere it already works.
(19:00):
If you liked today's episode, do me a favor.
Follow Transportopia wherever you get your podcasts.
Leave us a rating, tell a friend,
and visit transportopia.org for show notes,
photos from the trip, and links to everything
Lauren and I talked about.
And drop us a line while you're there.
I read every message.
I'm Rick Lemme.
Goodbye, everybody.
(19:21):
And remember, take the train.
♪♪
♪♪
(19:49):
♪♪
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