 New York’s subway system has become one of the busiest and most extensive in the world, serving nearly 5 million passengers every day with 26 train lines operating on 800 miles of track. As New York City spread into a wider metropolitan area, commuter bus networks and rail lines grew. New York City’s commuter rail system is the most extensive in the United States, with about 250 stations and 20 rail lines serving more than 150 million commuters annually.(a)
Public transportation in New York City began in the late 1820s with horse-drawn omnibuses. The first steam-driven cable car line opened in 1883. In 1909 electric trolleybuses replaced them, and for 70 years trolleybuses ran in all five boroughs of New York City. The first elevated line (“el”) opened in 1868. By 1880 most Manhattan residents were within a 19-minute walk of an “el,” which took passengers above the congested streets. The mid-1880s saw rapid immigration. Overcrowding was rife. As in London, an underground rail network was seen as necessary. But it took a blizzard in March 1888, completely paralyzing the streets, to provide the impetus for an underground rail system. The subway was designed both to move people about within Manhattan, and to connect tracts of undeveloped land. After years of political wrangling, a plan for a subway was approved in 1894. In 1904, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company opened and carried more than 100,000 passengers on the day of the opening ceremony. Subway trains, at close to 40 miles an hour, were much faster than trolleys (6 miles an hour) and elevated trains (12 miles an hour). More people could now be moved at faster speeds. It has been a never-ending struggle to expand the transport system fast enough to accommodate population growth. Most of the subway system in use today was built between 1913 and 1931; the number of annual rail passengers jumped from 500 million in 1901 to 2.5 billion in 1929.(b) In 1940 the city unified the three independent subway lines under public ownership, allowing for a more integrated approach to transport development. The payoff is inclusive and sustainable urbanization. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has served a 5,000-square-mile region since 1968. According to the 2000 U.S. census, New York City is the only locality in the United States where fewer than half of all households own a car—the figure is even lower in Manhattan at fewer than a quarter— compared with 92 percent nationally. One in every three users of mass transit in the United States and two-thirds of the nation’s rail riders live in New York City and its suburbs.(c) Source: WDR 2009 team. Note: a. The New York City Transit Museum Teacher Resource Center, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Official Web site. b. The New York City Transit Museum Teacher Resource Center. c. The New York City Transit Museum Teacher Resource Center. | 
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