MTA confirms platforms are outside the scope of the cooling centre programme, technically
Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The City Prepares Comprehensively for Everywhere Except Underground
NEW YORK — As temperatures reached ninety-four degrees across the five boroughs this week, the city activated its Cool NYC programme, deploying 400 cooling centres in libraries, community centres, senior facilities, and public buildings where residents could escape the heat, access cold water, and sit near air conditioning that is maintained, tested, and operational, a combination of features that has not been achieved simultaneously in any subway station below Forty-Second Street since the Obama administration.
The cooling centre network covers every borough and is staffed by city workers trained to assist heat-vulnerable populations including the elderly, the young, the unhoused, and people wearing suits, which the programme technically does not list as a vulnerable group but which the data suggests is accurate. The centres logged over forty thousand visits in the first three days of the heat event. The subway logged approximately four million daily riders who experienced conditions that the MTA described as hot and that riders described using words the MTA would not use in its official communications.
Platform Temperatures: A Data Point
Independent temperature monitoring conducted by the Riders Alliance at fourteen underground stations found platform temperatures ranging from 94 to 112 degrees Fahrenheit during peak hours, with the highest readings recorded at Union Square and Times Square stations, which are among the busiest in the system. The MTA confirmed the readings were consistent with its own internal monitoring, which it conducts but does not routinely publish, and said the temperatures reflect the challenge of cooling an underground system that predates modern HVAC technology and currently lacks the capital funding to retrofit ventilation at scale.
The capital funding required to cool the subway adequately has been estimated by engineers at between twelve and eighteen billion dollars over fifteen years, which is both a large number and a number that has been available to read in MTA capital planning documents since 2018, alongside the ventilation needs, the estimated timeline, and a note that funding has not been identified. The note has not been updated. The funding has not been identified. The temperature this summer is approximately what the documents said it would be if the funding was not identified, which is what happened, and which the documents accurately predicted, and which nobody is surprised by except people reading the documents for the first time, who are sometimes journalists, who then write articles, which join the documents in the archive, which is also not air conditioned.
The Cooling Centre and the Subway Platform
The geographic relationship between cooling centres and subway platforms produces what urban planners call an accessibility gap, and what commuters call a problem: the cooling centre is in the library, the library is above ground, the subway is below ground, and getting from one to the other requires returning to the ninety-four-degree street, which is cooler than the platform but still hot, and then going back underground, which is hotter, and then waiting on a platform that is hotter still for a train that arrives and immediately fills with body heat and reduces the net cooling achieved by the journey to approximately negative. The city says the cooling centre programme is designed to supplement, not replace, air-conditioned trains. The trains are air-conditioned. The platforms are where the problem is. The platforms are not in the programme.
Mayor Mamdani, sweating visibly on the platform at Ditmars Boulevard, confirmed this week that subway cooling is in his capital priorities, his conversations with the MTA, and his morning briefing materials, all of which are also hot, and that the signal at Roosevelt Avenue is still broken, and that the task force on free buses has scheduled its August meeting, and that he will be on the train tomorrow morning, as he is every morning, in whatever the platform temperature turns out to be, which he said is at least one way to ensure the conditions at Roosevelt Avenue remain in his working memory. The train arrived. He got on. The doors closed. The air conditioning in the car was working. He sat down. He opened his briefing materials. He was, for that moment, cool. It did not last very long, because nothing does on the subway, but for that moment, on the train, moving, it was fine.
The city’s Office of Emergency Management confirmed this week that all 400 cooling centres remained open through the heat event and that none reported capacity issues, which officials described as good news and which advocates for unhoused New Yorkers described as evidence that the centres are not reaching everyone who needs them, because if they were reaching everyone who needed them they would be full, and they are not full, and the people who are not in them are somewhere in the city in the heat, on stoops or in shelters or on subway platforms, and the platform temperature at Union Square is 112 degrees, and the cooling centre is in the library two blocks away, and the gap between those two locations is not a long walk but it is not a short one either, and some people cannot make it, and some people do not know the centre is there, and some people tried once and did not feel safe, and some people are on the F train, waiting at Roosevelt Avenue, where the signal is still broken, and where the mayor is also waiting, in the heat, with his briefing materials, which include the cooling centre numbers and the platform temperature and the task force calendar and the capital plan and everything else that is being worked on, simultaneously, in a city that contains every problem at once and enough people to address all of them, if the systems would cooperate, which they will, eventually, because they have to, because this is New York, and New York always does, eventually, what it has to do, and then argues about whether it did it right for the next fifty years, which is also, in its way, how it stays alive.
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SOURCE: Satirical Journalism