How many cities in the US have at least one subway station?
 

Seriously , I'm curious . Could a top 20 be made? Obviously New York would be on top.

Does it have to be underground or are you talking about heavy rail only?

I guess You mean municipalities. I think most systems runs within a single city or municipality, as New York. But Washington goes by some different municipalities, the same as BART, And I think Atlanta. PATH in NY-NJ runs within four municipalities, I think, and PATCO between Philadelphia and NJ also goes by some different municipalities.

Here is a Wikipedia list where You can find all United States systems and find out the ubication of the stations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...s_by_ridership

We can do this. Here are the 50 largest urbanized areas.

There are probably a few extra ghost stations underground as well.

That list leaves off heavy rail Metra


Metra (reporting mark METX) is the commuter rail division of the Regional Transportation Authority of the Chicago metropolitan area. Metropolitan Rail Corporation or Metra operates 241 stations on 11 different rail lines. Throughout the 21st century, it has been at least the fourth busiest commuter rail system in the United States by ridership. Experiencing a 1.7% decline in ridership from the previous year, Metra trains offered 81.3 million passenger rides in 2012.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metra


Which would rank 7th. Or if combined with the L rank second.

Also, Newark has a subway and there are subway PATH stops in places like Jersey City. I'm not familiar enough with PATH or New Jersey to name any other cities that might have one underground PATH station, though. Also, technically Cambridge is distinct from Boston, so depending on the criteria both that and Somerville could be separately listed, as well as places like Arlington, Virginia and Oakland, California.

In addition to those, Miami, Detroit and Las Vegas each have at least one line of sort of elevated, grade-separated, not-a-bus transportation that might be included if "subway" was used as shorthand for "metro-style service" and not meant to mean literally underground.

If you mean "heavy rail" rather than actual underground stops, then Miami's metrorail has stops in Miami, Coral Gables, South Miami, Hialeah and Medley (along with Unincorporated Miami-Dade County).

Louisiana station on the SE line in Denver feels sort of like a subway station. Part of the platform is beneath an underpass and you go down stairs from a street level plaza. Aside from the fact it's next to a giant freeway that's a really nice little urban corner actually.

I know it doesn't count though. I just felt like posting because when I rode the line I thought it was in fact underground and did not realize it wasn't until I just glanced at Google Maps.

I'm trying to think if any other ambiguous cases exist.

My list is urbanized areas, not incorporated cities (because incorporated cities are meaningless), and not transit agencies (because some cities have consolidated regional agencies and some don't).

And it's for underground rail stations, regardless of heavy/light/whatever. An underground light rail station counts, but an elevated heavy rail one does not.

Others are of course free to make separate lists using separate methods, if they prefer.

It could be light rail or heavy.

That is because Metra, as that extract forma Wikipedia says, is considered commuter rail. In Chicago, the system considered as urban heavy rail AKA metro (which is a better word that subway since can be either subway, elevated or at ground level)

Here is the list of commuter rail systems in the US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...s_by_ridership

You mean ANY underground rail station in ANY city?

So like Union City, NJ counts, because the light rail stations are underground?

^ i was just wondering that, if so its going to be the same for seattle too.

The OP already answered your question: "It could be light rail or heavy."

Yeah, it is not clear what You really mean.
By subway stations do you mean any rail station, either heavy, light or commuter ubicated on an underground or subterranean level?

And what do you mean by cities, is it municipalities or metropolitan areas?

As crawford said, there is an underground light rail station in Union City that could be considered either on that city, as a separate entity or in metropolitan New York. Also PATH Have some underground and some elevated stations. If You also include commuter rail, then I think that Penn Station could be considered as such, since it is located underground, as millenium station in Chicago is.

Those are all valid questions, as in I wasn't laying out a whole lot of rules to the list.

I simply mean a form of rapid rail transit that is underground and connected within a region. So for instance, you could consider New York's Subway system as one , and Path in New Jersey another. There are always variables that make it perplexing to ponder up a list. So make your own list, with your own rules. This isn't a super serious question.

In my own mind, I would consider St Louis' Metrolink one city's system with 4 subway stations, despite the fact that it goes through various other suburban cities in Illinois and Missouri. It's all run by the same agency.

Miami doesn't have any "Underground" stations at all.

The systems with at least one station underground would be, as far as I know


-New York Area
Subway
PATH
Hudson Bergen Light Rail
-Chicago Area
El
Metra commuter
-Philadelphia area
Subway
PATCO
-San Francisco area
BART
Muni Metro
-Boston
-Los Angeles
-Washington
-Atlanta
-Baltimore
-Pittsburgh
-Cleveland
-Saint Louis
-Minneapolis
-Seattle
-Portland
-Dallas

I could have some left.

To calculate how many stations in each system are underground could be pretty difficult (good luck with New York) in other cases just one or two stations are underground.

Cincinnati has four subway stations that are currently being used by Casper, Slimer, and George Burns.

i was unaware that minneapolis and san diego had any underground stations. interesting list.

The San Diego Trolley runs in a subway under the campus of San Diego State University. That is where the city's one subway station is located:

http://arweb.sdsu.edu/es/virtualtour...s/transit2.jpg
source

MARTA Subway Stations - Atlanta
 

By my count, there are 14 MARTA stations that are subway (below ground).

• 5 on the Blue / Green lines
  5 on the Red / Gold lines
  4 on the Red Line

The underground station is at the airport. You can get off your plane and get on the train downtown without going outside, which is nice if you are traveling in winter.

There is another stop in the basement of the parking ramp at the Mall of America which allows people with long layovers at MSP to go shopping there pretty easily.

It isn't an underground station but it kind of feels like it:

http://subwaynut.com/minneapolis/mal...ofamerica2.jpg

It is actually the only cool thing about the Mall.

Pittsburgh actually has two lines that share an underground loop, the Red Line and the Blue Line. There are currently 6 grade-separated stops within Downtown, and four are subway: Steel Plaza, Wood Street, Gateway Center, and the North Side station that opened with the North Shore Connector...

Don't forget Camden, NJ. Both the City Hall and Broadway Stations of the PATCO Speedline are underground there.

Dallas and Portland each only have one underground station. In Dallas it's the City Place station in Uptown and in Portland it's the Washington Park station west of downtown. Dallas had one other planned underground station at Knox-Henderson that was partially built but never opened because of NIMBY 's.

That's right. I was on the PATCO back in the day when my aunt and uncle used to live in Cherry Hill and we'd hop on the Speed Line from Haddonfield to the end of the line in Center City. I do recall those two subway stations in Camden before crossing the Delaware via the Ben Franklin Bridge.

:tup:

Great list. And I'm glad the condition of "ligh rail or heavy" was left out. It's an irrelevant point because some LRT subway stations are just as intensive....sometimes even more intensive than heavy rail. The rolling stock and speed has nothing do with whether a transit line has a station underground.

America left St. Louis to die, and we fuckin' got some shit done.

how many have elevated rail with stops. probably less then subways

That might be a tough one. I think you have the true elevated station category where the trains run on a structure above streets, alleys, and even buildings like in Chicago and NYC. Then there's stations on rail embankments that technically accomplish the same things, but have a different appearance.

There are a few sections in Boston that still run elevated for a station or two - I think the Red Line and Blue Line both have short sections that are elevated. Of course the Orange Line used to be elevated for long stretches, but no longer is.

Miami is also mostly all elevated. Parts of BART in the Bay Area are elevated. Las Vegas has an elevated monorail line. I don't think we should count Seattle's one monorail link, but I guess you could, and as the Seattle light rail approaches SeaTac, it's elevated. Philly has some elevated sections, like the Market-Frankford Line. Atlanta's MARTA is definitely elevated in places. Some of St. Louis' MetroLink runs elevated. All of those are elevated at least in parts on either steel or concrete pillars and not only on embankments.

PATCO in Philly has is elevated through most of Jersey. for such a short line it has everything... elevated, subway, a trench, and on a bridge.

didn't find them. . .while in boston years ago, looked for el lines to ride where i would be able to get good tourist views of the city. challenging due to subway, sunken trench, and surface lines (did get good str vibe from the green). orange line was particularly noteworthy; the view was of nothing but embankment. dull, but would imagine it's very economical for their agency in terms of maintenance. rusting steel structure above the streets (chicago's) are constantly under some form of repair, not to mention slow. makes one wonder why cities would still want those structures. boston’s lines—they seemed to get from point a to point b very efficiently.

In Boston, the Redline has a short elevated section at Charles/MGH. The Orange line has a viaduct as it goes through Charleston. The Greenline has the Lechmere viaduct, which is in the process of being lengthened now. I'm not that familiar with the Blue line, so i can't say if it has any elevated sections.

Le brew, sounds like you would have loved riding the old Washington Street Orange line el, but that was torn down decades ago.

as i wish chicago's had been. . . .
whoops! that's not a popular stance on this forum

I hope light rail will be replaced with a new thing that's elevated and cheap

BART has 23 miles of elevated rail and 13 elevated rail stations.

Chicago's Orange Line was only built two decades ago, unless you mean Chicago's "L" in general.

orange is modern. i refer to the 100-plus yrs. old iron elevated/wood platform structures which require constant maintenance. i don't feel those antiquated sections work well in the context of a modern transit system. heck, the ravenswood was just refurbished but it still runs slow as a snail. to me, that's a waste of resources. (i am not a regular commuter on this line, so someone who actually commutes would be better qualified to really assess.)

the downtown el is a nice symbol, and makes a great tourist attraction, however in modern terms, its very inefficient.

but hell, you're asking someone who adores the expressway median transit flyers which most on this board hate.

The steel structures are not something we'd build today - the noise they create would immediately fail the EIS. The closest you can get is what they did on the rebuilt Pink Line... steel beams on concrete columns with shock absorbers at each joint. CTA cheaped out on that project, but they did it right on the Orange Line/Red Line where they fly over Chinatown... gravel ballast to absorb the rumbling and parapet walls to block the screeching. There's just a faint rumble when the train goes by.

http://www.chicago-l.org/trains/gall...00/cta2063.jpg
src

Buffalo's Metro Rail has some underground stations as well.

There are at least two elevated stations in Minneapolis, both the Franklin Avenue and Lake Street stations are directly above the streets in question. I am pretty sure the new Target Field station is also elevated but I haven't checked it out in person yet.

Here's a cool graphic of Dallas' Cityplace Station, which sits 100 feet below Central Expressway...

http://jlsmith.net/Portfolio/cityplace.jpg
http://jlsmith.net

I see Portland's has already been mentioned, but it tops the list for deepest subway station in North America at 260 feet below the surface. ;)

Well, you illustrate one of the challenges the CTA experiences is that people *think* they understand what the CTA does/has done but people *don't* understand what it is the CTA has done.

That's in reference to the Brown Line - the CTA has NOT refurbished the Brown Line tracks - some really basic track work to keep it running, but the big money project you're referring to was only a rebuilding and extension of the stations and platforms so that they could accommodate longer trains (8-car trains instead of 6-car trains). That work did not include any serious work on the tracks in between stations.

The Pink Line did include complete rebuilding of the tracks and it does run a lot faster than it used to. The Brown Line tracks are not in as bad of shape as the Pink Line was. One could argue that the Brown Line could stand to be rebuilt in the same fashion, but it's been maintained better and it has more curves and would be a much bigger impact on riders during construction. I think the CTA would do better to propose extending the Brown to meet the Blue as a subway and, at the same time, converting the current ground-level portions of the line to a subway so that the entire length is grade-separated. One can dream, anyway.

the brown line: i avoid it, really. you are correct that i didn't grasp the project fully. your explanation does reinforce the point that the older sections of the el require extensive and cost prohibitive rebuilding, otherwise there will be patchwork into infinity.

the green line (which was closed for a 2 year rebuilding), could have stayed closed and demolished imo, and would have gone down in history forgotten as the nearby expressway median red and blue lines did quite well in absorbing the passengers during that time (i do not reside along that corridor, though). funds could have been spent on a more modern el into transit poor areas (the 606 park spur, for instance). the green line must be better/faster now though, haven’t heard complaints. during dan ryan south reconstruction, it was very convenient to have another rail line right next door for the re-route.

new mediums of transit need to be adopted (other than BRT); nostalgia does not get you there efficiently.

This thread shouldn't veer into arcane Chicago facts but the Brown Line's "Ravenswood Connector" is currently getting just such a rehab, between Armitage and Merchandise Mart. Lots of new welding, repair of damaged components, and (hopefully) a total repainting of the structure.

That Cityplace graphic is cool. It's crazy that DART sank so much money into only one station when the rest of the system is of a lower grade.