1. I've seen bent manhole covers. And not by application of heat - merely poorly-placed covers hit by very heavy weight.
2. As a resident of New Jersey and with a wife who has been commuting to one of three boroughs every weekday for fifteen years from NJ, I'm unfortunately all too familiar with the trains in and out of NYC. I also know a good number of people who commute daily from central (and even southern) New Jersey to NYC for work. Depending on your definition of "unreliable", any of the lines can be called unreliable - most days, they're okay and reasonably on time, but any shared-track train gets less and less sure of being on time the farther it goes from the city. The ACES train, in keeping with this, is okay most of the time but cannot be counted on with any real certainty. And finally, an old friend of my wife's (both of them have lived here all their 40+ years, and her friend has lived in the city his entire adult life) regularly visits family down in AC... and he always rents a car. If there's trouble on a track or in a tunnel, the train is SCREWED. With a car, you at least have multiple options: Holland, Lincoln, GWB, etc. For that friend, it's all about the reliability of having options - if things are going normally, the car option can easily be slower, but if there's a snag, the car HAS options.