Ancient Rome had a million people at the turn of the 1st century and was the financial and entertainment capital of the world too. People lived and stayed there too, until they didn't.
How many steam systems are left in the U.S. (outside college campuses)?
As for the steam system: it's an integral part of Manhattan's residential and commercial heating system. My understanding is that it pays for itself in charges to apartment buildings and businesses (including hospitals as mentioned), so there's no current question around its financial sustainability.
It sounds like the steam system is important because it's important?
Do you have any numbers beyond idioms and anecdotes? At what point in the maintenance curve will the steam system become unprofitable?
And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic.
No; comparing antiquity Rome (a city whose collapse is a subject of ongoing historical debate) to NYC (a city that was built 2600 years later) does not make for a serious comparison.
Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc. These cities have similar infrastructural problems that they've been able to solve in ways that NYC hasn't, sometimes for political or historical reasons (e.g. being bombed so thoroughly that building new infrastructure is the only reasonable option).
> And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic.
I don't love it, or hate it. I recognize that it's a piece of infrastructure, and that infrastructure comes with assumptions. You can either pay to maintain those assumptions, or pay to upend them. Either way, you pay. With NYC paying to maintain them is frequently optimal, since upending them requires revisiting other, even more costly assumptions.
For NYC's steam system, concretely: there's been no real public noise from ConEd about the system's unmaintainability or unsustainability. They recently agreed to a new rate/fee schedule with the state PSC[1], on which I can find no significant controversial reporting.
Edit: to make it more clear: ConEd's steam network provides heating and industrial steam to around 1500 buildings in Manhattan. That's 1500 buildings, most of which are near or over a century old, that would need to have steam boilers retrofitted into their basements (or have their entire steam plumbing ripped out and replaced with something else). That's a lot of time and money in already one of the world's most expensive labor markets.
[1]: https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/11/pr23116.pd...
Sounds like what an ancient Greek might've said if you suggested comparing contemporary Athens with ancient Thebes. I don't see why not. You can certainly compare, say, square pyramids with equal sides, be it the Great Pyramid built around the 2600s BCE, or the smaller Luxor pyramid in Vegas and that scar on the face of Paris built 4500 years later. It's only been a few thousand years, what's really changed that much?
The Romans didn't quite get to an urban steam system, it's true, but they were quite close with the hypocaust (central heating), Aeolipile (Hero's steam engine), and Cloaca Maxima (sewer system).
> Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc.
Of those it looks like only Paris has a steam system. Do any other major cities (still) have steam systems? Have there been any new recent installs outside college campuses?
I don't think so. It's a legacy technology, and legacy technologies are such mostly due to cost. Old infrastructure generally gets more expensive, until it becomes unsustainable. But people expect continuity and push back against changes that compromise the perceived identity of the place (like steam in Manhattan), hence most historical cities are no longer around at all.
Again, the point is economical: the cost of a technology is not defined solely by its age, but by the cost of replacing it with the newer thing. For Manhattan, the cost of replacing the steam network would be immense, with marginal-to-net-negative consequences (larger demands on the city's electrical grid, higher emissions, waste of steam from local cogeneration plants, additional local emissions from per-building boilers). This doesn't mean that district steam is shiny, new, or particularly good technology (and it doesn't mean the opposite, either). It just means it isn't worth replacing, and probably won't be for a while.
(By all means, if you want to run on the "kill the steam network" ticket, I'm sure someone will vote for you. But I think that money would be better spent finishing the SAS, IBX, and building some more crosstown lines in Brooklyn and Queens instead.)
Personally I care more about bringing NYC-level transit to more of the country than further optimizing one of the few pretty good systems we have.
If I ran, I'd run on a transit ticket, with a platform of mostly cutting subsidies for private passive transportation, and increasing subsidies for public and active transportation.
Let's build out a national high-speed rail network. It's been great to see the economic development along the Downeaster tracks since reopening in 2001, and exciting that it looks like a new Black Hawk line will happen in northern Illinois near where I grew up.
Automobiles have been a disaster for the country. I didn't see a noticeable improvement in safety metrics from seatbelts in the data: the only correlation I saw was reduced crashes during periods of economic decline... Pedestrian deaths keep climbing. Emission and safety (hood height) standards are a clown show. EVs don't solve for MPs in TWPs/RWPs. One more line in New York isn't where I'd focus my energy, but I'm all for those lines and improving connections with NJ and New England.
Americans have never moved less, and more and more intense hyperlocal squabbling seems a result. Historically, if you didn't like local decisions or wanted better opportunities, you moved. That's not really the case anymore. (I previously cofounded a moving and storage startup.)
Imagine if the Chinese had spent the last twenty years keeping the 19th century alive like veritable steampunks in Shanghai [1] instead of building out the world's best high-speed rail system.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/08/26-years-of-growth...