I Refuse To Believe There Will Just Never, Ever Be AC In The NYC Subway Stations

So we've been in a bit of a heat wave here in the Apple (local slang for NYC). Temps going up to 100 every day for about a week. Fairly normal for this time of the year, and to be honest, I don't really mind it as I like the feeling of the sun burning my skin. Buttttttt with one exception- when I go down to hop on the Subway.

You see, I commute to work 5 days a week using the fantastic NYC Subway system. That's not sarcasm, the Subway is very convenient and gets me to work very quickly. But during the hot as fuck summer months, if you have to stand in most Subway stations for more than a minute, you might as well be playing Russian Roulette in Hell. Because buddy, as you can see in that picture above, it gets hotter than Hitler down there. Like, unbreathable. You see one fat guy and hope you don't witness him collapsing onto the tracks.

So while some of the newer stations are beautiful and AC'd, most have air so thick you could cut it with a knife. And the air conditioned trains, while amazing when you step onto them, are a double edged sword because they are taking the hot air out of the cars and pushing that air into the stations, making it even hotter. So the only solution would be to have a huge undertaking and go station by station, installing AC one at a time. The cost? About $5 billion.

NY Times - But in engineering terms, “the basic fact is that an old system like our subway system isn’t designed for air-conditioning,” Mr. Torres-Springer said. Almost every mile of track is open to the atmosphere via stairways and sidewalk grates.

“For the same way that your air-conditioner doesn’t work well if your windows are open, air-conditioning isn’t effective on a subway platform,” he said.

 

But what if they did? When asked to ballpark the cost of retrofitting the entire system with spot chillers, Mr. Torres-Springer declined. (“I don’t even know how we would begin to go about estimating that,” he said.) But here’s some back-of-the-envelope math: Grand Central’s 43 chillers cost around $10 million when they were installed in 2000, or about $17 million in today’s dollars. Multiply that by the 281 underground stations and you land in the neighborhood of $4.8 billion.

Riddle me this- we can send $500 billion to Ukraine but can't break 1% of that off for the most important city in the entire world to fix the Subway stations? But seriously- is there a plan? We have to, at some point, just rip off the band-aid and improve the stations. We can't be in the year 2100 and still have the same stations, right? At some point we need to get into the future. We're not talking about putting man on the moon, we're talking about air condition! It's not some groundbreaking new technology! 

I know the NYC mayor is too busy flying to Ibiza and giving credit cards to the Fentanyl Zombies that roam the streets, but maybe in between all of that he can come to his sense and fix the Subway. 

And I'll be honest- I fucking love living in NYC. Took me a few years to get this way, but I cannot imagine living in a suburb when cities exist. Cities rock. But they also got to keep up with the times and put money into what matters the most- getting us around the island. They were on the right track with the car tax, and then the governor stupidly pulled the plug on it a night before it was set to go into action. There are simply far too many cars in Manhattan. How do they not cap it at a certain number? We can't just let a billion cars into a city not built for this amount of traffic! I know I'm going off on a tangent now but it simply makes no sense!

PS: We talked about this, the heads up match vs Dave, conspiracy theories, and more on KFC Radio. A great time.