Rob and Mary Ann Gorlin are absolutely delighted. Instead of one of the many sights in New York, the two tourists from Detroit are planning this morning: 72nd Street Station, the newly opened subway station on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “It’s so immaculate and beautiful inside,” says Mary Ann of the clean, bright platform.
After taking a look at the new route network, the two of them head downtown in a flashing train. Almost a century has passed since plans for the Second Avenue expansion were first discussed in 1929. First the stock market crash and the global economic crisis intervened, then bad planning and budgeting delayed the construction. After several foundation stone layings and tunnel excavations in the 1970s, construction work finally began in 2007.
The new subway station at 96th and 2nd Streets
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With a cost of $4.5 billion (€4.2 billion) for three new stations, the subway is already the most expensive subway in the world. Immaculate and beautiful – an odd description of the route network, which is congested at rush hour, stuffy in summer and rat-ridden. The C-Train, for example, resembles a rumbling steel monster, and delays are part of everyday life.
The rattling, rattling trains use an average of 5.6 million people on a weekday and surprise visitors from Munich or Berlin who are otherwise used to smoothly gliding trains, precise departure times and modern stations. A hint of tomorrow is now blowing on 72nd, 86th and 96th Streets, where tourists take photos on escalators and commuters enjoy shorter commutes. “The train here takes me directly to Times Square. That could easily be 20 minutes,” says Scott Schwamp, who is about to return to New Jersey after an appointment with a customer. “If I had run to the 6 train, I would have been late,” says bakery manager Latifah Williams.
But the subway, which opened in 1904, made the leap into the 21st century only slowly. Large parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island are not served by the subway at all and let some New Yorkers die of thirst in the “subway desert”, as a designer team has dubbed the hard-to-reach areas.
The three new, spotlessly clean stations now supply the Upper East Side – whether the expanded Q line will lead to Harlem or to the southern tip of Manhattan, as hoped, remains to be seen.
Around 5.6 million people are transported on an average working day.
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The city of over a million inhabitants desperately needs new sections: during rush hour, the trains that are already running at the highest possible frequency can hardly cope with the 12 percent increase in passengers between 2009 and 2016, and junctions are heavily overloaded. If you are unlucky, you have to wait for several trains on busy routes in order to then squeeze into one of the full carriages. Displays or announcements about departure times are the exception rather than the rule. The fact that some passengers stretch out on the seats with their legs wide apart and women are groped does not make the crowding any more pleasant. The MTA has meanwhile started a poster campaign against “manspreading” with wide legs, which is also classified as an administrative offence. The police find it difficult to track down gropers, even with recordings from surveillance cameras.
The Second Avenue subway line runs from 63rd to 96th Streets and on to the chic Upper East Side.
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After all, good cell phone reception and free WiFi are slowly becoming the norm in the New York subway. According to plans by Governor Andrew Cuomo, more than 30 existing train stations are to be modernized at a cost of 27 billion dollars (25.4 billion euros) over the next five years and, as in London, Paris and Berlin, continuously accessible trains are to be purchased.
Better lighting, digital display boards and charging stations with USB ports on trains are also part of the plan. Until then, New Yorkers can look forward to the network expansion of about 30 blocks, which took almost 100 years to build. On 72nd Street, where early in the morning more and more people are looking into the dark tunnel and waiting in a long silence for the approaching rumble, a man says: “New station, same delays.”
Johannes Schmitt-Tegge (dpa)
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