New York moves by rule: fares, ferries and streets with opening hours

New York is switching off the way its transit system has been paid for. Since 1 January 2026 a MetroCard can no longer be bought or refilled — a card already in your pocket still works, and any value left on it can be moved to an OMNY card at a Customer Service Center or spent down before it expires. The MTA says MetroCard and cash will stop being accepted at the same time in 2026, and that the exact date will be announced later in the year. Cash is still taken on local, limited, rush and Select Bus Service buses in the meantime, but only as exact change in coins — into the farebox as you board a local, limited or rush bus, and, on Select Bus Service, into a sidewalk kiosk before boarding, which issues a paper ticket you must keep with you throughout the trip. Once cash is no longer accepted on buses, coins and notes will still buy credit on an OMNY card at vending machines in every subway station and at more than 2,700 retail locations.

That transition is a good way into how the city actually works, because New York’s movement systems are not really a map. They are a set of published rules, and almost every one of them has a hard edge: a moment in the day, a direction of travel, a line drawn across a street. Distance is rarely what decides whether a trip works. The edge is.

The fare is a rule, not a distance

The subway does not charge by distance. The fare is $3 for most riders on the subway and on local, limited, rush and Select Bus Service buses; express buses are a separate product at $7.25, and seniors and people with qualifying disabilities pay half the regular fare. You tap in at the turnstile and, as the MTA’s own instructions put it, you don’t tap when you exit — which is the mechanism that makes two stops and thirty stops cost the same.

The real edge is not distance but the payment instrument. Subway and local bus fares are capped at $35 over a seven-day period, and only if you tap the same OMNY card, bank card or phone every single time. The cap belongs to the card, not to the rider: split a week’s travel across two cards and you get two separate tallies, each running to its own $35 cap, and neither of them gets there as fast. Nor do group trips and transfers count toward the total — which is the contrast the MTA itself draws when it tells groups that using separate cards or devices is what lets everyone in the group earn free rides. Include express bus rides and the cap becomes $67 across all three modes, while registered reduced-fare riders cap at $17.50. And the seven days are not a calendar week: the clock starts at your first tap, and once it expires it restarts at the next one.

The MTA publishes that benefit in two currencies, and the two do not obviously line up. The same page that gives the $35 cap also tells group travellers that rides are free “when each person pays for 12 rides using their same card or phone within seven days” — and twelve rides at the $3 fare published on the same site is $36. Neither of the MTA’s two fare pages says how the ride that crosses the cap is charged, in full or only for the remainder — and that is the figure that would reconcile them. The dollar cap is the number both pages give, so it is the safer one to plan against.

Transfers carry their own edge. You get one free transfer within two hours of paying: subway to bus, bus to subway, or bus to bus. Subway to subway is not on that list, and stepping up to an express bus is charged as the difference between the two fares rather than given free. Use the same card or device, or you are charged twice.

Then there is the exception that gives the design away. Two walks between stations are treated as though they happened inside the system: walk between Lexington Av/59 St and Lexington Av/63 St, or between Junius St and Livonia Av, and you transfer for free simply by tapping in again. For fare purposes, that stretch of pavement is a corridor.

Step-free access has a direction

The MTA’s accessibility guidance for subway travel, updated in December 2025, says there are more than 150 ADA-accessible subway stations. Its own station register is more specific. On 7 September 2026 that file held 496 station records — records, not interchanges, so a multi-line complex appears more than once, and the 496 include the 21 Staten Island Railway entries. Of those, 163 were flagged fully accessible, 324 not accessible, and nine something in between.

The nine are the interesting ones, because they show that in New York step-free access is not only a place but a direction. Each of them carries the accessible direction in the data. 50 St on the C and E is recorded as “Downtown only”, and so is Spring St on the same lines. 137 St-City College on the 1 is “Uptown only”. Wilson Av on the L is “Manhattan-bound only”. Hoyt St on the 2 and 3 is “Outbound only”. At 86 St on the 4, 5 and 6, the note reads “Uptown local only” — one direction, and the local platform at that.

A wheelchair user can therefore plan a step-free journey that works outbound and does not work coming home through the same station. This is a live operational file, refreshed on the morning it was read, so those totals are a reading of one day’s register rather than a fixed tally.

The free crossing, and the nine days it changes

None of that applies to the Staten Island Ferry, because the ferry is not an MTA service. NYC DOT runs it, free, every day of the week, year-round, between St. George and Lower Manhattan, and the department puts the crossing at approximately 25 minutes in either direction.

What is unusual is not that the boat is free. It is that a fare-free service runs to a real and quite demanding timetable. In the tables published on 7 September 2026, weekend service is a departure every thirty minutes around the clock — 48 sailings a day from each terminal, straight through the middle of the night. Weekdays run a different table rather than a fuller version of the same one: 58 departures from St. George and 59 from Whitehall, tightening to fifteen-minute gaps between 7:00 and 9:00 a.m. leaving Staten Island and between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. leaving Manhattan — but three weekend sailings at each terminal have no weekday counterpart at all.

And here is the edge that catches people out. On nine named holidays — New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day — the ferry runs the weekend schedule. Five of those always fall on a weekday and the rest fall wherever their date lands, so in practice the rule almost always replaces weekday service rather than changing anything about a Saturday. Plan a Thanksgiving morning crossing off the weekday table and you will reach St. George expecting a boat every fifteen minutes and find one every thirty. The service still runs, and it is still free. Only the timetable has moved.

NYC DOT attaches one further condition to all of it: all schedules are subject to change without notice. The shape above is the part worth understanding; an individual departure time is worth re-checking on the day.

Below 60th Street the street has a price

The third edge is a line on a map. Driving into Manhattan’s local streets and avenues south of and including 60 Street is tolled. The zone is defined by exclusion as much as by inclusion: the FDR Drive, the West Side Highway/Route 9A and the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel connections to West Street all run through the same ground without triggering the charge — though the MTA notes that getting between one of those roads and a river crossing often means using local streets, which is tolled.

The price then depends on the clock as much as the line. The peak rate applies from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays but only from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at weekends, and overnight rates are 75% lower than the corresponding peak rate. A passenger or small commercial vehicle with a valid E-ZPass pays $9 in the peak period and $2.25 overnight, and is charged once per day rather than once per entry — so a car that crosses the line four times in a day still pays once. Entering in the peak period through the Lincoln, Holland, Queens-Midtown or Hugh L. Carey tunnels earns an E-ZPass crossing credit of up to $3 against that toll; no credit is offered overnight.

Taxis and for-hire vehicles work the other way round. Instead of the daily toll, a vehicle licensed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission carries a per-trip charge, paid by the passenger, for each trip to, from, within or through the zone: $1.50 in a high-volume for-hire vehicle and $0.75 in a taxi, green cab or black car — and, unlike the private-car toll, the same amount overnight as at noon. Four trips means four charges.

Set the three prices side by side and the gradient the city has built becomes explicit. Crossing the harbour by ferry costs nothing. A subway ride costs $3. Bringing a car below 60 Street in the middle of a weekday, with an E-ZPass, costs $9. They are three different transactions rather than one journey priced three ways — but they are the three prices the city has chosen to publish.

Streets with opening hours

The fourth edge makes a street behave like a building: it has opening hours. New York’s Open Streets programme converts roadway into public space, but not permanently and not everywhere at once. On 7 September 2026 NYC DOT listed 162 locations — 98 full closures, 38 full closures serving schools, and 26 designated Limited Local Access. DOT cautions on the same page that its published information may not be complete, so read that as a listing rather than a census.

That third category repays a careful read, because the name is doing real work. A Limited Local Access street is designated for pedestrian and cyclist use during a specified set of hours and days each week, while local vehicle access is still permitted — parking, collecting or dropping off passengers, deliveries, Access-A-Ride and emergency vehicles — with drivers advised to drive at 5 mph. It is not a car-free street. It is a street where the default has been inverted for part of the week.

Every one of those 162 listings carries an explicit start and end date. Ninety-three of the windows close before 31 December 2026, and sixty share a single start date, 15 April 2026. A closing date is not a closure: the programme runs on an annual cycle, and DOT states that applications to be a 2026 partner have closed while the application period for the 2027 season opens in autumn 2026. The 34 Avenue corridor in Queens, running from 69 Street to Junction Boulevard, is listed as Limited Local Access daily from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., with the 34th Avenue Open Streets Coalition named as its partner and a window of 15 April to 31 December 2026. Note what those hours do and do not promise: on a Limited Local Access street they are the hours in which the roadway is designated for people on foot and on bikes while local vehicle access continues, not hours without cars. DOT adds that Open Streets hours are subject to change and may include setup and breakdown time, so on any listing the published window is an outer bound rather than the time the street is actually in use as public space. In 2024 the department adopted rules codifying how partners apply and what the programme requires of them.

The plaza programme runs on the same principle, and shows what that principle produces. A new pedestrian plaza needs an organisation willing to operate, maintain and manage it, plus at least eight letters of support from community stakeholders, and DOT states that it prioritises neighbourhoods that lack open space. Who can take that on is visible in the listing itself. On 7 September 2026 the department’s plaza page listed 95 locations — 93 distinct plazas, two of them split across two segments — naming 66 different partners: business improvement districts, merchants and civic associations, “Friends of” groups, colleges and universities, a school, and City agencies. Business improvement districts and City agencies between them hold 43 of the 95 listed plazas, with NYC Parks, NYC DOT and NYC EDC named as the partner on 24. The listing falls as 37 in Manhattan, 29 in Brooklyn, 19 in Queens, 9 in the Bronx and one on Staten Island — again, as published, and again with DOT’s caveat that it may not be complete.

Public space here is not simply built. It is applied for, granted a window, and maintained by whoever asked for it.

The layer with no timetable

One layer of the city is described without any of these edges. NYC DOT publishes 1,550 lane miles of cycling network and, in the same list, “555 total protected bike lanes in the network” — a figure it gives with no unit attached, so it cannot simply be read as miles. It calls the network North America’s largest, a description the department offers without citing a comparison, so it is best read as its own claim rather than an established ranking. The number that says most about how the city moves is a quieter one: DOT states that 99% of residents live within one mile of the bicycle network.

That is a different kind of statement from a fare cap or a timetable. It describes coverage rather than conditions, and it is worth holding next to the others, because it makes clear that the edges in this article are choices rather than facts of geography. Every one of them could be written differently: a cap could run on a calendar week, a holiday could leave a timetable alone, and a lift could be built to serve both directions of a platform.

Which leaves a short practical version. Before you plan around the middle of any of these systems, find its edge: which card you are tapping, which direction the lift serves, which timetable the date falls under, which side of 60 Street you are on, and what hours the street is keeping today.