The New York Rapid-transit Subway

54 DISCUSSION ON NEW YORK SUBWAY. [Minutes of Sir John Wolfe Barry. the cost of the underpinning on that 11 mile of railway was only €34,000. The figures here quoted he had taken from the final certifi- cates of the work. Those savings were a mere nothing compared with the cost of two or three lifts at every station, considering first cost alone; but when the capitalized cost of working the lifts was taken into consideration, the financial facts were enormously against any undertaking involving lifts. Nobody could deny that the delay due to the lifts was very considerable; it could not be otherwise. The passenger had to change from the street to the lift, from the lift to the passage, and from the passage to the platform; and that made a great difference in the time occupied and in the cost of working the railway. Taking a lift 85 or 90 feet deep at each end of a journey of 4 mile, it would be found that a very large portion of the time occupied by the whole journey had been spent in getting from the street to the train and back to the street. He had esti- mated that in a 4-mile journey about 8 to 10 per cent, of the distance was travelled in lifts and passages. Such facts had con- vinced him many years ago that the tube system of construction was wrong; and he believed that as time went on it would be admitted by all that the tubes in London, although highly ingenious, well constructed, and admirably worked, could never afford the accom- modation which was given by a shallow subway such as existed in New York, Paris, and Budapest. The Metropolitan Railway in Paris, with its numerous stations approached from the pavement, short staircases, and frequent trains, gave an amount of convenient accommodation which he was certain could never be given by the tubes of London. As journeys on the surface became easier, owing to the widening of streets and the development of quicker modes of surface transit, he believed the tube railways would suffer severely from that competition. Another point on which he thought the Author must be highly congratulated was that he had grasped the necessities of an express service as well as a local service. Unfortu- nately that had not been realized in the past in London, and he supposed it never would be now, unless some day a railway were built beneath the Metropolitan or the District Railway, and even that could not compare for a moment with the arrangements for the express service which was given by the New York Rapid-Transit Subway. The requirement of a person travelling from the suburbs to his business was that he should be carried quickly, and not be made to stop wearisomely at the innumerable stations which were necessary for local traffic. In the system of an express service inter- changing conveniently with the slower trains, lie thought New York possessed a means of urban communication which would be