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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

> The Subway spends billions of dollars a year on power. Most of that power (for trains) is spent accelerating so every stop counts.

The entire MTA spends less than $500 million on electricity annually (which includes the subway, Long Island Railroad and MetroNorth commuter rail) of a roughly $17 billion dollar budget.

Additionally, the 4.5 million people who use the 28th Street stop on the 1 line and the 6.7 million people who use the 28th Street on the 6 line and the 3.3 million people who use the 28th Street stop on the R/W lines politely disagree with you.

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Annual ridership figures != people. For stops that are primarily commuter stops you have to divide by hundreds to get the actual person figure. 10k people using any given stop for one round trip twice per day is over 7M annual rides for that one stop. It's actually less than that for 18th St; using real data, the average daily ridership for is 8.6k. Compare with a station that is actually busy, like Union Square, which gets 109k daily ridership. Figures from https://graphics.wsj.com/table/NYRIDER_0420

So yeah, those people would be inconvenienced by having to walk a few more blocks, but way, way more people would experience greater convenience by having faster commutes along those very busy lines since they wouldn't need to make such close stops.

There's a happy medium between too many stops and too few. Two stops within a quarter of a mile is way too many. You can imagine a subway system in which a north/south line stopped at literally every block; you'd probably still have more than a thousand daily riders at every stop, but that's no argument to keep every single one of those stops (or even worse, build them). The system performance would be terrible and it'd take forever to get anywhere. The same is still true when you have stops that are only four short blocks away from each other.

I know how the ridership is measured. I’m not sure what your point was. It’s also not surprising that the busiest stations have 10x as many riders as those less busy.

The four track system of the NYC Subway was its most important innovation, and it literally solved the problem your talking about. You don’t want all the stops? Walk to 14th and take the express.

> I know how the ridership is measured. I’m not sure what your point was.

Probably that it's inaccurate for you to say "the 4.5 million people who use the 28th Street stop" because that number is ridership, not people.

C’mon -- that was a rhetorical flourish.

A rhetorical flourish that conveniently made your argument appear much stronger than it actually was.

That literally is the point of rhetoric.

Moreover, if power becomes significant you can add regenerative breaking to regain a large fraction of energy (if they're not doing so already; maybe not because of the age of the trains).

The London Underground definitely does that. Also in part because it reduces the heat output. The underground has been heatsoaking for decades and it’s hitting problematic temperature levels.

This article is a great read: https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/06/10/cooling-the-tube...

Apparently about half of the heat generated in the tunnels is/was from braking. And the tunnel temperatures have risen from 14-30C since around 1908.

Is a good read about the engineering challenges.

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