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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

>The systems are in extremely similar cities, are almost exactly the same route miles, and are similarly old. Yet NYC’s system costs almost twice as much to run.

There is one fundamental difference between the two systems and that is that the London Tube stops service overnight while the New York City Subway remains open 24/7/365. Having a nightly maintenance window of several hours in which they can do preventive maintenance is likely a big factor in keeping costs down. Throw that in with the reduction of labor with limited hours of operation and I bet those two make up a solid portion of the difference in cost per rider.

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MTA liberally shuts down service for hours/days at a time. I wouldn’t chalk it all up to not having enough time to do maintanence. It was 24/7 back when it was functioning more consistently as well.

Which is the exact type of things that leads to customer complaints. Customers have to be inconvenienced in order to do maintenance on the NYC Subway. In turn the bar to require maintenance will be higher than it is in London. The natural result of years of delayed maintenance is for the system to get worse and worse as time goes on.

I disagree that maintenance is more difficult in London than in New York. I spent about two weeks in London about a decade ago. The first thing that struck me is that when you arrived at the tube station in Heathrow you'd get all sorts of information about which lines were in service that day. In trying to navigate London there was a constant shuffle about which stations or lines were out of service. Plus it took about two hours to get from Heathrow to Victoria due to signal issues (the wrong kind of snow is also an issue, apparently).

That is not remotely a representative experience of today’s Tube.

The NY subway is also able to run 24/7 because of redundancies in routes, so they can perform maintenance without the subway stopping. London doesn't have this option.

Worth pointing out that there are redundancies in some routes, not in others. Sincerely, L train rider :)

Yeah service to Williamsburg is still dicey. You can be a sardine on the L, or if you're close enough to the JMZ, you'd better not have to ride back after 8pm (one or more of the trains may not be running).

The other fundamental difference being that the London tube has ~250mi (~402km) of track, while NYC has ~840mi (~1352km) of track.

London actually now has a night-tube as well.

Although that's only on Friday and Saturday.

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