A Ride in the Cab: Next Stop, New York City

Systems. Complex systems. Intricate groundworks and detailed frameworks are the underlying factors that underpin our everyday lives. Yet, there are few places where the roles of each individual mechanism are as evident as in New York City, a controlled chaos I am lucky enough to call my home.

From a young age, I was fascinated with the moving parts that comprise the city. I would spend hours sitting on my windowsill, watching the cars and people go by down bustling First Avenue. Particularly, the hordes of yellow blobs caught the eye of my curious toddler self–leading my first word to ultimately be “taxi”.

Now older, I see the individual role that each specific vehicle holds within the larger system. Every taxi plays an integral role in supporting and upholding the structure of the city. The responsibility of one driver to bring a patron from their unique pick-up spot to their desired destination could be the difference between a teacher arriving on time to greet and welcome their students into the classroom and dozens of parents left supervising their children and late for work.

While this impact still may seem small, there is a ripple effect that seeps much further beyond this seemingly isolated event. One could go on about how this one interaction could reach much further, but the true effect is much more intuitively understood when one realizes that there are thousands of yellow taxis on the road each day that perform hundreds of thousands of rides each day, and that infrastructure like this is crucial to the success of the city.

The yellow taxi example is just one of many crucial elements that formulate the backbone of the city. The same logic extends beyond the yellow taxis to analogous services like Uber and Lyft, and further into the work of the Metropolitan Transit Authority that manages our buses and subways, reaching and supporting an even larger population.

The topic of transportation certainly exemplifies the importance of a well-oiled system in the city, but what about those that are less visible? Sure, it does not take an urban planner to recognize that people need to get from one place to another, that is a thought that crosses each of our minds daily–even if we do not necessarily think of how we are getting there. The situation gets more interesting when we begin to delve into the systems that take place behind the scenes.

Sanitation, for one, is a mechanism that, if working properly, people never have to worry about until it fails. In New York City, and many cities in the Global North, residents take for granted that the heaps of trash piled on the sidewalks magically disappear overnight. However, when a fault in the routine occurs, it is noticeable–and affects us all.

From personal experience, I have witnessed and fallen prey to a fault in our sanitation system. On November 15, 2018, New York City received a snowstorm it was not prepared for. At the time, I was in sixth grade, attending middle school in a different borough from where I resided, relying on the school bus for transport. Typically, leading up to an impending snowfall, or when temperatures drop below a certain point, the city’s sanitation team salts the roads as a precaution to prevent the formation of ice.

Key detail: this snow was not expected. While we did not receive much snow, our roads were not equipped to handle it. Pulling out from my school, the initial sign of trouble was when my bus skidded down the hill and into the side fence of an adjacent property. Skipping past the minutiae, the long-story-short of it was that students like myself were stuck on the buses for hours, without food or facilities.

I was considered lucky, making it home at around 8:45pm, cutting my losses and getting off my bus over forty blocks (two miles) from where I live and trudging through the slushy blocks home. Others remained in transit till the late hours of 2:00am, almost twelve hours past our initial departure of 3:25pm.

That day revealed the city in a way I had never seen before: not as motion, but as dependence. When one system failed, countless others stalled alongside it. What had once felt like background noise became suddenly visible, and I began to understand how fragile coordination at scale can be. I no longer sit on my windowsill watching taxis pass below, but the city still moves with the same layered complexity.

What once appeared as chaos now reads as structure, maintained not by spectacle, but by consistency. Living in New York has taught me to notice the systems that make everyday life possible, and to respect the quiet precision required to keep a city in motion.