Subway If anything truly revolutionized the way New Yorkers live, work and play, it's the subway. On any given weekday, 4.5 million people travel on the 6,400 cars that run along 722 miles of track beneath the city's five teeming (热闹的) boroughs. For all their complaints about it-the dirt! The crowding! The noise!—the subway remains nothing short of the miracle it was when the subway opened in 1904. What was the original impetus behind developing the subway? Existence on these streets, with the teeming masses, could not be borne any longer. Many areas were very diseased, new immigrants were huddled together. What was needed was the development of the outer boroughs to really occupy the workers, and the people needed to fill the jobs and facilities and services that Manhattan always had. Was there any resistance to building it? New York City had all the difficulties that we have today: NIMBY-ism existed even then. We had Tammany Hall we had corruption. But we also had a lot of very high-minded New Yorkers, people who really felt that this city must grow and had the best interests of the city at heart. At the same time electricity was invented. Being a very, very new science it was being very closely adapted for street railways. Then you have this invention of multiple-unit train control, where whole series of cars can run at the same time while piloted by the first-car motorman. That was an incredible thing. Now they had the tools in which they could run underground and not worry about soot ventilation(通风). Then of course you have to pick the route. Just like today, everybody wants it to go somewhere else. It's very interesting to note that the first subway route was a public-private venture, where the city owned the subway and put up the money, some ＄50 million, which at the time was astronomical(庞大的). Is the initial economic impact at all quantifiable? Around 1910, before the subway started going to Brooklyn it was nowhere near a million in population. Within ab6ut 10 years of the opening of the subway systems there, the population goes beyond a million. If you look at the 1930s when it went out to Flushing, there's nothing out there. It's like prairie it's like going out to Montana. If you look at it after the war, there's not one lot left. Basically, we built an empire based on public transit. This does not happen with the automobile. We did not see this with the maze of highway systems that went up. What we did see was the deterioration of the center core city to the growth of the suburbs. One of the things about a subway car, there's from 40 to 150 people in this ear. I am now going to put every one of them in an automobile: You would have a line of automobiles that would stretch four to five blocks in length. But they all fit in one subway car, they all fit in one bus. Is subway central to the city even today? Everything the city of New York depends on the growth of the subway system. About three quarters of people took the train to work today. The idea of public transit is essential, sensible and the key to a healthy city. The ability New York City had on the opening of the subway is that they could physically move 30,000 people from 125th Street to Wall Street in less than 15 minutes. That's incredible. No one was able to do that. When the subway system was able to pull this kind of volume, people said 'You know, I think I am going to live in the Bronx. I think I am going to live in upper Manhattan-96th Street doesn't look so far away when you think of it.' It was a massive success, it was money spent in the right place. I would say that that ＄50 million probably brought the tune of trillions of dollars and are still producing trillions of dollars to this day. Why did people think the subway was an aesthetic wonder? More than a technological feat, the subway was also