Have you heard the legend of the Mole people? Legend says the Mole people are a secret society living in the tunnels under the city. They have their own rules and leaders and hardly ever come to the surface. Legend also says their food of choice is rats.

 

While this myth isn’t quite true, there was a group of about one hundred homeless people who lived in an abandoned tunnel on the Upper West Side before it was put back in use. They did not, however, form a secret society.

 

Nobody really knows what is going on underneath the City of New York. It’s hard to believe that we can map buried, ancient cities using lasers, but we don’t have a map that shows all the tunnels, train tracks, sewers, water lines, basements, and electrical lines buried beneath NYC’s streets.

 

The subway system alone is complex to map. There are 24 lines, 468 stations, and 443 miles of underground tracks. Most of it is old and in dire need of repairs and upgrades, and the same is true for the city’s waterlines, sewers, and electrical lines.

 

When cities grow because more and more people want to live in them (a process called urbanization), they face many challenges such as providing enough housing, water, electricity, sanitation, and transportation for everyone. If the city grows quickly and without a plan or map for that growth, service systems like subways, sewers, and electrical lines can become a rather jumbled mess making them difficult to maintain and repair. 

 

Even with a well-planned and fully mapped infrastructure, fixing a city’s infrastructure is expensive and difficult to do without interrupting services for millions of residents. NYC’s government is working hard to improve the city’s outdated subway system because, as any New Yorker will tell you, the subway is essential to life in NYC.

 

Have you ridden the subway in any other cities? Which one was your favorite?