The East Coast heat wave in late June may have come and gone — everywhere but the subway stations, that is. There, the heat was more of the same.
With one of the most extensive train systems in the country, New York City’s subway stations are also some of the oldest. For the country’s most populous city, with an average daily system ridership of over 3.4 million, some of the older underground stations and their poor ventilation can make way for heat sinks.
In addition to poor ventilation for some stations, the heat produced from the brakes of the train as it rolls into a station, along with the hot air displaced from the air conditioning in the actual train cars, can add to the excessive temperatures.
Jack Klein, a now-resident of New York City, noticed the heat in subway stations when he first moved to the city from Ohio about a year and a half ago.
“I was just shocked at how miserable existence felt, especially in the summer, and when you go up [outside the station] it just felt normal,” Klein said.
After poking around, he noticed that there were no publicly available datasets that showed long-term heat-related metrics in some of New York’s most crowded stations. That’s when he decided to take matters into his own hands.
Using his own money, Klein bought small Kestrel Drop D2 sensors that he strategically placed throughout certain city subway stations to catalog the heat indexes towards a long-term dataset. He currently has sensors in nine stations, as well as some outside of stations, that tell him metrics like the ambient air temperature — the temperature of the air surrounding the sensors.
The project morphed into him starting NewYorkLab.co, a “data-first, solutions-driven organization focused on environmental intelligence for urban infrastructure,” as Klein described it.
“Invisible risks carry real costs — for health, equity, and public trust,” Klein said. “We’re starting with New York City’s subways — quantifying extreme heat in underground stations using custom sensors and community-driven data collection.
While researchers in the past have collected spot readings, Klein looks to create a long-term comprehensive dataset of subway station heat indices, taking into account things like humidity and how that affects the index, often referred to as the “feel-like” temperature on the human body.
The National Weather Service categorizes heat indices of 125 degrees Fahrenheit or higher as “Extreme Danger” in prolonged exposure. Some of Klein’s readings have shown “feel-like” temperatures in stations well into the 130-degree range. For vulnerable populations, especially during crowded station times or prolonged waiting because of train delays, these temperatures can be even more dangerous.
“I think the people I want to focus on the most are the elderly, the disabled, and pregnant women, because you look down at these stations and there are not many benches, so you have to stand,” Klein said. “And for the more vulnerable populations, if there’s a delay, I think it has serious health ramifications.”
Some reception to the project has been less enthusiastic, with Klein saying his status as a transplant is not helping him in convincing some of the problems.
“It’s kind of just chalked up as, ‘if you live in New York, you put up with it,’ or ‘you should have seen what it was like in the 80s,'” Klein said. “I’m trying to be part of the movement that is exploring this as a public health issue.”
Others, however, have been thrilled to hear of someone quantifying the heat they feel daily. Klein started social media accounts to accompany his NewYorkLab.co and has been consistently posting since late May; to date, he’s amassed over 1,400 followers on Instagram, and over 2,400 on TikTok.
Klein has already gotten dozens of messages from people elated to see this work being done — from fellow residents of the city offering to volunteer for the effort, to organizations like the Weather Channel looking to partner on initiatives. The latest update shared by Klein on his @newyorklab.co Instagram handle described a brainstorming session with The Weather Company — the parent company of The Weather Channel — interested in the grassroots-led project.
And while the subway heat monitoring was the initial project that kicked things off, Klein said he’s done some other measurements, including air quality index and noise levels in subway stations, too.
“I’m really interested in air quality, too. For example, when I was at the Broadway-Lafayette station in SoHo, it felt terrible, like my lungs were hurting,” Klein said. “So I have an air quality monitor too, and I’ve been doing some side projects on that.”
The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) — the operating body for the city’s trains — has procedures in place for the train cars themselves; CBS reported that if the air conditioning for a single train car measures above 90 degrees, the ten-car train must head to a yard where it gets repaired — possibly slowing service and the train line capacity and leading to even more crowded, heated subway stations. In other words, solving one issue can exacerbate another.
“It’s interesting that MTA hasn’t done [this project],” Klein said. “There’s this Gothamist [article] that had all the data around complaints on train cars — so they have that data, but they don’t have these other datasets that are in a negative light,” Klein said, referencing an article that analyzed years of MTA data regarding complaints of broken air conditioning on subway cars.
The MTA responded to a request for comment from Saporta Report, citing “extreme heat caused by climate change impacts” as the primary driver of station heat. It also noted that subway platforms are included in “Goal 8: Expand underground air circulation and cooling” of its Climate Resiliency Roadmap, indicating they are aware of the issue and expect it to get worse as global temperatures rise.
Long-term, Klein said he hopes this effort and future ones from NewYorkLab.co can go beyond bringing awareness to problems, but actually generating datasets that can be used in public policy solutions.
He acknowledged that solutions may not be easy or straightforward for a more than century-old subway system; air conditioning would be extremely costly and not work very well given the subways aren’t exactly closed systems, he remarked.
Still, Klein is hopeful that the grassroots-led project — which is just heating up itself — can generate enough data and ideas to come up with some remedy to the issue.
Leave a comment