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Comment by berbec | Hacker News Reader

So NYC has 7x the number of stations for 5x the number of riders?

The New York City subway system is old, one of the first in the world. It's not built to modern standards; in a lot of places it was built by cut-and-cover, which means excavating the entire route along the subway and then rebuilding the road essentially as a roof above the subway line.

As a result of this lineage it also has quite frequent stops, which are easy to put in when the subway is just a stairway's height beneath the street. To give you an idea, the 1 line stops at 14th, 18th, 23rd, 28th, and 34th Streets. That's five stops in one mile.

One of the first is a stretch, because the most compared lines were around or before NY's experience. The London Underground had its first line in 1863. Paris, 1900. NY, 1904.

Maybe we should say "metro system" then, as NYC's first el train was 36 years prior to its first subway.

This table has the subway at the world's ninth oldest, which is definitely still one of the oldest considering there's hundreds now: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-world-s-oldest-metro...

Agreed, although I'd add it's substantially more complicated to dug tunnels under dense cities. The Underground is a substantial feat in that regard.

As a tangent, London is adding overground trains as part of its expansion. The Overground is pretty recent (and it shows) as is the fully-automated DLR, and now there's a Crossrail making an appearance. NY hasn't invested in a hell of a lot in overground infrastructure and it feels like that's a logical step in the outer boroughs.

Crossrail is underground through London. The Overground uses existing rail infrastructure just under direct TFL management so isn't really new. There are a few new sections but they exist only to join up two lines. DLR is possibly the only real example of new overground trains and partly that is because it follows existing rail lines for quite a distance.

not sure what your point was. Tokyo has several subways of a similar styl yet they manage to maintain them, renew, and rebuild while the train is running and stations are in use

The point was to explain why the NYC subway system has a relatively high number of stations, in direct reply to someone who was asking why the NYC subway system has a relatively high number of stations. I'm not sure what your point is though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway

Quick Wiki search indicates NYC has about 1,112 km of rail vs Stockholms 105.7 km. So about 8-9 times the distance

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