Subway comparison
One typical thing that happens with tourists here in NY is that they tend to find the subway not quite as well upkept as the one in their home towns, and, of course, they brag about it. I always find it amusing. Little do they realize the order of magnitude of the NYC subway system, which is massive, and makes the cutesy clean look of small town subways impractical and pretty much impossible to accomplish. It is, in fact, the most extensive public transportation system in the world. Just keeping it running 24 hours a day (the only one in the world,) is a feat in itself. As compared to other systems, it transports 10x the number of passengers across 10x the track-miles.
I thought I would go ahead and do a quick comparison to put things in perspective:
Barcelona Subway
System length: 115 Km of tracks
Passengers/day: 310,000
Started working in 1924
NYC Subway
System length: 1,355 Km of tracks (!)
Passengers/day: 5.1 Million (!!)
First elevated operation in 1868, first underground operation in 1904
So, I wonder how well other systems would hold up if they had over 5 million passengers going through them every single day 
08/022/02007 9:46 PM
