h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There are also no H, I, K, O, P or U trains, nor a zero train.

The S train circle is not colored blue, but grey. There, at times, are multiple S trains, one in Manhattan, one in Brooklyn, that do not connect.

Nobody uses the subway color coding to give directions or as a guide to anything but that certain train lines share certain tracks. You'll go insane if you use the colors.

Everyone outside of Manhattan says "the city" to mean Manhattan, not just Brooklynites.

Ah, but once upon a time, there *was* a "K" & an "H" train. They were eliminated only in the last decade or so.

The other way that New Yorkers describe the subway is with the initials of the original railroad companies. The IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) is all the numbered lines, and is divided pretty much into the East Side IRT and the West Side IRT (or the Lex and Broadway trains). The BMT (Brooklyn Metropolitan Transit) is the yellow trains and the other letter trains that don't go anywhere useful: the L, the J, the M, and lots of elevated trains in Brooklyn. The IND (Independent line) is the A-G trains.

More suggestions: the note about how all the streets in New York are numbered is, I think, terribly misleading. I'm not the right person to entirely correct this error, but I know these things:

In Manhattan: The streets above the East and West Village are all numbered (though occasionally also named after famous people, i.e. Edgar Allen Poe, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, Malcolm X), but most of the streets in the Villages and below are named, after who I have no idea.

In Queens: The streets and avenues are almost all numbered, with only occasional exceptions. Many avenues do not run all the way through Queens, however (Queens is a big place!), so don't be surprised if, while taking a perfectly ordinary walk down a street, you suddenly jump from 25th avenue to 28th avenue. Just act natural.

In Brooklyn: A very significant portion of Brooklyn uses named rather than numbered streets. I don't live there, so I can't give details off the top of my head, but I think I can say that the neighborhoods of Greenpoint, Willimsburg, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, and Red Hook are all rife with, if not exclusively, named streets.

I unfortunately cannot help the person lost in the Bronx or Staten Island; I haven't spent enough time in either borough to say.

Also, a note about the structure of the entry in general. Clearly it is very much a work in progress, but I'd suggest to the editors that they start splitting the entry now into perhaps six entries: one for each of the five boroughs, and then one for information that applies to most of New York City (like information about transportation or things to do across the five boroughs, good bars, good museums, city history that applies roughly equally to all five boroughs, that sort of thing). You may not have received entries yet, but as word spreads about this thing, you soon will.

The Bronx uses the same street grid as Manhattan, pretty much, e.g. 149th St in the Bronx is just east of 149th St. in Manhattan. Can't help you on Staten Island. In Queens, "streets", "places", "courts" and "lanes" run north-south, while "avenues", "roads", "drives" and "terraces" run east-west.

Staten Island has no system for street names. Only one of the neighborhoods has numbered streets (New Dorp, on the South Shore). The only suggestion I can make is the following: All house numbers will lead you to the ferry. The lowest numbered houses on a street are those closest to the ferry terminal. The key streets to look out for are Hylan Boulevard(South Shore), Richmond Avenue, Victory Boulevard(Mid-Island), Forest Avenue, Richmond Terrace(North Shore), and Richmond Road and Bay Street(East Shore). The Staten Island Expressway runs through the center of the island, basically from the Goethals Bridge to the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.