New York City
We did most of our traveling through Grand Central Terminal on 42nd street, and as long as you knew which train to get on, it was generally easy enough to get there and on your train. However, we did most of our studies on Penn Station and Moynihan Station, which were relatively more difficult to navigate.
For even those students who left the borough of Manhattan to venture into other boroughs, such as Queens and the Bronx, the travel was relatively easy. Obtaining and using the metro card was also significantly easier than in Boston, although the fact that we had unlimited funds on the metrocards might have a lot to do with that. The efficiency of the rail system in New York was notably impressive, as one of our students noticed that they had missed their train and the next train came in only two minutes. All in all, the grid system in Manhattan and the user-friendly subway system made travel within New York pretty simple.
Upon reaching New York, it became very clear that the layout of New York City was specifically designed to be easily navigable. At least in the borough of Manhattan, the island is dissected into grids where streets are given numbers instead of names (i.e. 39th st, 81st st, etc.). This made traveling within Manhattan generally pretty easy as one needs all the help one can get, since the large crowds and large stations can be intimidating for people not used to using public transit at such a large scale.
Photo 1: Central Park and Manhattan Skyline.
Photo 2: Subway station sign.
Photo 3: Section of Manhattan Grid.
Photo 4: A New York Metro Card in use.
Photo 5: Empire State Building from Moynihan Station.