10 things to know about the New York subway

The New York subway is not the longest system in the world, not the fastest, and definitely not the cleanest. What it has instead is scale, age and an unusual amount of unresolved history running under the street. Almost everything odd about it, the letters and the numbers, the four-track trunk lines, the stations that are two stations, comes from decisions taken by three rival companies before 1940.

Ten things that are actually worth knowing, checked against the MTA's own counts and the station data behind DailyMetro New York. If you want to poke at the network yourself, the New York explorer has a page per service and per station.

1. It has more stations than any other system, and nobody agrees how many

The MTA counts 472 stations in operation, which is the largest station count of any rapid transit system on earth. It also counts 423, and both numbers are correct: the smaller one treats a free-transfer complex such as Times Square-42nd Street as a single station rather than as the five separate stations that were built there by three different companies. Ridership tables usually use 423. Signs and press releases usually use 472.

It serves four boroughs. Staten Island has the Staten Island Railway instead, which uses subway cars and subway fares but is not connected to the subway by track.

2. It has essentially never closed

Twenty-four hour service, seven days a week, every day of the year, since 1904. Very few systems anywhere do this, and none of them at this size, because it requires maintenance to happen alongside running trains rather than in a nightly window. That single fact explains most of the weekend service changes New Yorkers complain about.

The exceptions are memorable precisely because they are so rare: strikes, hurricanes (Sandy flooded tunnels in 2012), a handful of blizzards, and the overnight cleaning shutdown that ran from May 2020 into 2021, the longest scheduled interruption in the system's history.

3. It is two incompatible systems bolted together

The numbered services are the A Division, inherited from the Interborough Rapid Transit company. The lettered services are the B Division, inherited from the BMT and the city-built IND. The three companies were unified under city control in 1940, and the tunnels never were. A Division cars are about 8 feet 7 inches wide and 51 feet long; B Division cars run up to 10 feet wide and 75 feet long.

A B Division train physically cannot fit through an A Division tunnel, so rolling stock cannot be moved between them in service. When you ride the 6 and then the L, you are riding two different railways that happen to share a fare.

4. The letters and numbers are services, not lines

This is the distinction that trips up every visitor and quite a few locals. The physical infrastructure is a line with a name, like the IND Eighth Avenue Line or the BMT Brighton Line. What runs on it is a service, the bullet on the front of the train. Wikipedia counts 36 physical lines carrying 28 services, three of them shuttles.

Which is why the same platform can be an express stop in the morning and a local stop at midnight, and why the B simply does not exist on a Sunday while the track it uses carries trains all weekend. In the game the bullets are treated as lines, because that is how riders talk, but underneath they are timetables.

5. The express tracks are the real design feature

Most world systems have two tracks per line. The IRT's original 1904 route was built with four, two local and two express, and the pattern was repeated on the trunk lines that followed. This is why a 2 can overtake a 1 on the West Side and why the distance from the Bronx to Lower Manhattan is bearable at all.

It also means a New York station is often four tracks and two island platforms wide, an expensive shape that later systems abandoned. About 40 percent of the network's track is not in a tunnel at all: it is elevated or at surface level, which is why so much of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx hears the subway rather than feeling it.

6. Parts of it are older than the subway

The first underground line opened on 27 October 1904. The oldest structure still carrying trains is an elevated span in Brooklyn dating to 1885, now part of the BMT Jamaica Line, nineteen years older than the subway it belongs to.

Older still are the steam railroad stops the network swallowed. Brighton Beach, Church Avenue, Kings Highway, Prospect Park and Newkirk Plaza all carry an 1878 opening date in the game's data, from their years as the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railway, and the Q still runs through all of them. Far Rockaway - Mott Avenue on the A dates to 1869, when it was a Long Island Rail Road station and the subway was thirty-five years from existing.

7. The Second Avenue Subway took 97 years

Proposed in 1920. Delayed by the Depression, then the war, then the fiscal crisis. The Second and Third Avenue elevated lines were demolished in 1942 and 1955 on the assumption the subway would replace them, which it did not. Digging began in October 1972 and stopped in September 1975 with three isolated tunnel sections finished and sealed.

Phase 1 finally opened on 1 January 2017: three stations at 72nd, 86th and 96th Street on the Q, 1.8 miles, 4.45 billion dollars, among the highest per-mile costs ever recorded for urban rail. Phase 2, running north to 125th Street, began construction in June 2026 at an estimated 6 billion dollars.

8. The deepest and highest stations are both freaks of geography

191st Street on the 1 sits roughly 173 feet (53 m) below the street, the deepest in the system, because Washington Heights is a rock ridge and the line had to stay level. Reaching it means either elevators, which are still attended, or a 1,000-foot pedestrian tunnel to Broadway that has its own street name, Tunnel Street.

Smith-Ninth Streets on the F and G goes the other way: its platforms are 87.5 feet above ground, high enough to clear the lift bridge over the Gowanus Canal for masted ships that stopped coming decades ago. It was the highest rapid transit station in the world until Hualongqiao opened in Chongqing in 2022.

9. Ridership is enormous and wildly lopsided

The system carried 2.31 billion passengers in 2025. Its single-day record is over 6.2 million riders, set on 29 October 2015. Those are numbers only Tokyo, Seoul, Moscow and a few Chinese systems can argue with.

The spread inside that total is the interesting part. The Times Square complex takes roughly 46 million entries a year. Broad Channel, out on its island in Jamaica Bay, took 57,312 in 2024, last of 423. That is a ratio of about 800 to 1 between the busiest and quietest stations on the same fare.

10. Accessibility is the system's oldest unsolved problem

Age cuts both ways. A network mostly built between 1904 and 1940 was built with stairs, and retrofitting elevators into a station wedged under a street, above a sewer and beside a foundation is genuinely hard. As of June 2026, 163 stations meet accessibility standards, well under half the system.

Under a class-action settlement reached in June 2022 and approved in April 2023, the MTA committed to making 95 percent of stations accessible by 2055, funded by a fixed share of every five-year capital plan. It is the only firm date the system has ever been given, and it is thirty years out.