Subway riders are used to unpredictable delays and service changes, but rarely do you see a meltdown the magnitude of this week’s. Tuesday morning’s collapse of multiple lines in Manhattan was all apparently driven by a tripped breaker at West 4th Street, where a breaker failed again just two days later on Thursday morning, delaying and suspending the same lines. These breakers are designed to prevent damage to the electrical systems. In this case, the hazard was not something internal to the system but something around it: extreme heat. Temperatures hovered around the dangerous level of high 90s with high humidity to boot, and were reportedly exceeding 100 degrees on platforms.
Old infrastructure, new realities
Urban systems practically everywhere, New York City included, are designed with a certain set of climate parameters in mind: it would be roughly between this and this temperature for this many days during these months, we would get such and such rainfall, and so on. These assumptions were based on statistical models, rooted in longtime data collection and observation, which makes sense. Up until relatively recently, you as an urban planner, city engineer or architect would not design things with the expectation that the climate would radically shift — because why would you?
For practically all of our existence as a species, major shifts in climate have tended to take place over millennia, with things like ice ages and periods of warming happening over thousands of years — certainly a timeframe well beyond what an urban designer thinking, maybe, 100 years into the future would consider. Of course, the problem, as you probably already know, is that all of a sudden we are not only shifting our climate far more rapidly, but more unpredictably. Freak events like the 2021 Texas deep freeze or a heat wave in the Pacific Northwest could not really have been envisioned by builders and planners in those climates. Even beyond that, the rate at which the planet is heating is already higher than what even climate researchers anticipated. It’s become something of a joke that the “hottest summer on record” or “the hottest year in recorded human history” are routine occurrences that barely even register.
Keeping the trains running, against all odds
To bring this back to the trains, we all obviously expect the MTA to keep the subway system, which is the social and economic lifeblood of the city, running smoothly. Its staff has executed frankly Herculean efforts to keep the system chugging along with what is often decades-old technology, and a daily ridership that exceeds the population of the entire state of Connecticut. Allayed against them are a series of forces, many of them political; since the 70s, the New York City transit system has been controlled by the state government in Albany, which has for just as long enjoyed asserting its power over the city that makes up nearly half its population and the bulk of its economic output.
Every year, the MTA becomes one more in the laundry list of issues that state lawmakers horse-trade and haggle over, including many who do not represent the city and are not particularly interested in the system’s long-term health (perhaps not realizing or not caring that any economic shock in New York City will reverberate around the state). As has by this point been extensively documented, the system is also an incorrigible money-guzzler, spending far more per mile of track than similar systems globally and often relying on pricey subcontractor work just to keep the lights on. The more it falls into disrepair, the more expensive it is to get it back up to good working order in a now-half-century-long cycle of mismanagement.
Then, there’s the heat. And the rain. Yes, it’s always been hot and it has always rained in New York City, but we have to remember that this is fundamentally not a system that was designed for sudden torrential downpours and multiple successive heat waves happening all the time. It was built and has been maintained upon a certain set of assumptions that are rapidly becoming moot. This is, at its core, a simple question of materials and engineering: you have, say, an electrical system built to operate to up to some 40 C, or roughly 100 F, with degrading performance up until that point. A catastrophic failure doesn’t necessarily happen the second the ambient temperature hits that threshold, but devices and cables housed underground, already producing their own heat from energy, and a broader system that is now consuming additional energy to cool all of the subway cars themselves, can easily blow out when kept at or near its max temperatures for prolonged periods.
That’s not something where you can just replace a part or tweak some settings; the whole subway infrastructure might be built upon the belief that temperatures like that are so rare as to be negligible when that might increasingly not be the case. Ditto rain; stations, platforms and tunnels have drainage systems, of course, but these are probably calibrated to a certain volume capacity over a particular interval. When the sky opens up and we get biblical rainfall even for relatively short periods, the systems get overwhelmed.
It’s not just the planet — it’s our commute, our streets, our routines
I’ve written about this a little here before, but I’m occasionally frustrated when elected officials, researchers and other journalists discuss the evolving climate crisis exclusively in terms of huge, almost unfathomable higher-order effects: mass extinction and crop failures, energy collapse, wars over water and so on. It’s not that these aren’t foreseeable consequences, and I think it’s crucial to illustrate them. Unfortunately, the general public often views these as just too abstract and too big-ticket to really imagine in a way that breeds either skepticism or complacency or, in the inverse, fatalism that it’s not worth doing anything about it.
I think it can be very useful to discuss things in much more localized, quotidian ways: climate change in the short to medium term means that your transit might stop working or outdoor activities that you enjoy might become impossible. Your individual health and that of your family might be at genuine and relatively immediate risk from the combination of high heat and high humidity, and so on. People care most, ultimately, about their immediate community and quality of life. While issues like the subway electrical systems are far from trivially solvable, people can see and even participate in addressing them far more directly, which in turn might mean a greater willingness to intervene on some of those larger issues. We can adapt our subway infrastructure to more heat and more rain with sufficient political will and investment, and if we can do that, then maybe we can address the bigger stuff too.
