I hate to say this, but New York City has the best transit in America. I know cities across the world struggle to play limbo with the bar we set here. It’s our God-given right to scream at traffic from an enormous truck, and we honor our founding fathers by pouring our tax money into highways. Still, a 24-hour subway with over 400 stations is impressive in any country, and the New York City subway has an extra special feature I’d like to talk about.
A typical metro has two railroad tracks, so you can run multiple trains in both directions. But slowing down, boarding passengers, and speeding back up every single stop takes extra time. If you can add two more tracks for a set of express trains that skip stops, you can get people around faster.
New York runs express trains all over the city. It’s part of the reason why the map is so… unapproachable. Like any complex system, you have to break it down one piece at a time. What better place to start than the 1 train?
The 1 train is a practical joke. It has two targets: Tourists, and anyone who lives west of Amsterdam Avenue between 103rd and 145th. It stops every ten blocks or so down the entire length of Manhattan. It’s one thing to go online and rattle off a fact like “Manhattan is 13 miles long.” It’s another thing to feel the overwhelming magnitude of this metropolis. You can feel it on the 1 train, watching the mosaics on the wall slowly count up. 50th Street. 59th Street. 66th Street. “Stand clear of the closing doors please.” (Why is he Southern?) This train crawls uptown like an ant while the 2 and 3 trains whip past like apex predators. Those were the express trains. There are twice as many express routes and we still picked the wrong one.
Well, how about a history lesson? These three trains run through the oldest part of the subway. Like many cities, New York had some proto-baby-transit after the Civil War: streetcars, elevated trains, horse drawn carriages. The elevated trains kept you safe from the chaotic miasma of human activity below, but even those couldn’t go over 12 miles an hour. This was unacceptable. Manhattan was too crowded to sustain life. You had working class families living in sardine cans in Hell’s Kitchen in the same country where you could trade a nickel and a firm handshake for 10 acres in Oregon. As a long, narrow island, Manhattan couldn’t expand outward like blobs in agar.io; the only way out is north. But the people work downtown, and a 12-mile-an-hour train on a 13-mile island just isn’t fast enough.
Decades of arguing led to this nine-mile route from City Hall–Brooklyn Bridge on the modern day 4, 5, and 6 trains, up to Grand Central, over to Times Square, then up to 145th & Broadway on the modern day 1 train. William Barclay Parsons, the project engineer, designed the tunnels from the beginning with four tracks for local and express trains. The local trains could get you from City Hall to Harlem in under forty minutes, but the express trains could save an extra ten minutes in each direction.
If you’re stuck on a local train, you might think you can save time by transferring to an express train. But the local and express trains are out of sync. They could only be in sync if both trains had the same average speed, which would defeat the entire purpose of having express trains. We could arrive at 72nd Street to find the train pulling up, which is very satisfying, or we could find it driving away, which is very frustrating.
If you spend more time waiting for the train than you save, you’re wasting time. But you can’t make predictions; this isn’t Switzerland. No transit in America has an honest timetable, so you can’t just do the math on the schedules. Thankfully, any good navigation app will let you compare transferring over staying put. I guess living in the future can be useful. The app is often guessing—anything can happen, after all—but its guess is better than yours.
For this and other reasons, you don’t often see express trains in other metros. They’re more common in commuter rails and other long-distance trains. I looked at maps from all over the world and only found express trains in the Tokyo Metro, the Shanghai Metro, and the L in Chicago. Two Tokyo Metro lines have express routes: Tozai and Fukutoshin. Tozai only runs express on this part extending beyond the spaghetti mess of the metro core. Fukutoshin is the newest line, it connects a bunch of other lines in the sort of outer ring of the system, and it runs express everywhere. Shanghai runs express trains on Line 16, and that also runs further outside the network. Chicago has the Purple Line, which is particularly strange: most of the time it’s a suburban route, but during rush hour it runs express to the Loop. It only skips stops when it shares right-of-way with the Red Line. That’s the only four-track segment on the Purple Line beyond the Loop.
So even when express routes exist, they typically get one or two lines, and they skip stops in the outer reaches. New York has been fully committed from the start, and their first subway line did the opposite, skipping midtown and downtown stations but staying local in Harlem.
So why else are express trains so unpopular? For one, they’re expensive. You have to install and maintain more railroad tracks to pass local trains. For another, consider station density. I surveyed the route length and station count for 11 transit systems using—what else?—Wikipedia.[1] New York has the second highest density on this list. Only Paris is higher. I haven’t been there, but Paris is one of those agar.io blobs, and the metro network is deeply interconnected. So, on average, you probably lose more time transferring between trains than standing on one train. Toronto and Montreal are a close third and fourth, but the rail networks are one-fifth the size of New York’s.
It may not be worth it for most metros to run express, but if you’re a train geek like me, try the ones in New York. My favorite is the E train to Forest Hills.[2] The F, M, and R trains also stop there, but if you’re stuck on the M or the R, you stop 13 times in Queens. On the E and F, you stop three times. At top speed the train jostles you around like a time machine in a cheesy movie. And at the end, you emerge into this quaint European village that looks nothing like the rest of the city. It’s a worthwhile trip.
