Take a trip through the slimy, sickening side of the city and prepare yourself for A Great Big SCARE! It's ironically appropriate that the subway celebrates its birthday right around the spookiest time of year, as it prominently features in New Yorkers' nightmares. 115 years ago on October 27th, 1904, The original 28 subway stations opened, stretching from City Hall to 145th Street in Manhattan. From 1904 until 1948, the price for a subway ride was just 5¢, a price range that's equivalent to about 92¢ in today's dollars. Instead, you'll be paying three times that amount for a ride today, in a 100-year-old system that is struggling to keep up with modern demand. Although the subway's on-time performance recently hit a six-year high, only 81% of trains arrive on time during a typical weekday, and the subway's previous on-time figures put it at the lowest among all major cities' transit systems. In 2017, Governor Cuomo declared a state of emergency for the New York transit system in an effort to revitalize the deteriorating subway and modernize its signal system. In an effort to avoid further increasing the subway fare, the MTA's $54 billion plan to improve the subway will rely on revenue from a congestion pricing toll on vehicles that enter Manhattan south of 61st Street. Vehicles entering central and southern Manhattan will be subject to a toll of around $12 for the privilege of sitting in traffic that has slowed to a crawl in recent years as rideshare drivers have flooded the streets, with speeds in Midtown in 2018 averaging just 4.7 mph. If streets lined with traffic and a subway running on ancient tracks make New York sound like the city for you, don't forget to pay at the door! Beginning January 2020, the cost of entering the city via bridge or tunnel will increase to $16 and the AirTrain ride to JFK Airport will increase to $7.75. If you've finally paid your toll to get into the city, good luck finding a place to stay! According to real estate site StreetEasy's data through August 2019, the prices of rentals are increasing while the prices of homes for sale are decreasing. The median asking price for a one-bedroom in Manhattan jumped 7.5% year-over-year, adding $233 to the monthly rent. If you end up looking at apartments more in your price range, the horrors continue. According to bedbugregistry.com, there have been 4,490 reports of bedbugs across the city, including a report from October 26th of a traveler who woke up from a lovely sleep in room 1622 of a hotel in Midtown only to find a bedbug crawling on his pillow. The hotel refused to believe him until he capture a live bug in a sandwich bag and showed it to the hotel staff. If you think you're safe from bedbugs if you don't stay in a Midtown hotel, consider the tale of a resident in Long Island City, who ordered a bed frame and headboard online, only to open the package and find bedbugs inside. When New Yorkers glance up to see air conditioners precariously hanging from every apartment window, a pedestrian's mind turns to tragedy, picturing their inevitable death after one of those menacing sheet metal boxes breaks free from its windowsill. If the air conditioner plummets toward you, will those days at the gym give you the nimble speed to heroically jump out of its path? In the past 30 years, there have been only a handful of documented air conditioner drops, despite millions of New Yorkers propping their A/Cs up on the hopes that the power cord will support the full weight of the machine if it ever tears loose. While you allow the fear of falling machinery to fade from your mind, consider a report from 2008 that showed the increased energy usage of air conditioning during the summer directly contributes to up to 1,000 deaths annually in the eastern United States. Without sustainable forms of energy, power-hungry air conditioning units put extra demand on co