List of New York City Subway Stations

List Of New York City Subway Stations

The New York City Subway is a rapid transit system that serves four of the five boroughs of New York City in the U.S. state of New York: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. Its operator is the New York City Transit Authority, which is itself controlled by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York. 5.284 million passengers use the system daily (weekdays, 2011), making it the busiest rapid transit system in the United States and the seventh busiest in the world.

The present New York City Subway system is composed of three formerly separate systems that merged in 1940: the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT), and the Independent Subway System (IND). The privately held IRT, founded in 1902, constructed and operated the first underground railway line in New York City. The opening of this line on October 27, 1904 is commonly cited as the opening of the modern New York City Subway, although some elevated lines of the IRT and BMT that were initially incorporated into the New York City Subway system but then demolished predate this. The oldest sections of elevated lines still in operation were built in 1885. The BMT, founded in 1923 and also privately held, was formed from the bankruptcy of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company. The IND was created by the City of New York in 1921 to be a municipally owned competitor of the two private companies. Unification in June 1940 by the New York City Board of Transportation brought the three systems under one operator. The New York City Transit Authority, created in 1953 to be a public benefit corporation that acquired the rapid transit and surface line (buses and streetcars) infrastructure of the Board of Transportation, remains the operator of the New York City Subway today.

The official count of stations is 468; however, this tabulation classifies some transfer stations as two or more stations, which are called "station complexes" within the nomenclature of the New York City Subway. If station complexes are counted as one station each, the number of stations is 421. 32 such station complexes exist. The reason for the higher count generally lies in the history of the New York City Subway: IRT, BMT and IND stations are usually counted separately, particularly if their lines are not parallel and are adjacent to or on another level to each other. Regardless of how stations are counted, the New York City Subway has the largest number of rapid transit stations in the world. Included in the station counts is one station that is temporarily closed: Cortlandt Street on the IRT Broadway – Seventh Avenue Line. The station closed when it was destroyed during the September 11, 2001 attacks. There are numerous other New York City Subway stations that are closed, many of which stem from the demolition of elevated lines once operated by the IRT and the BMT that were made largely but not completely redundant to underground lines subsequently constructed. The newest subway station in the New York City Subway network is South Ferry on the IRT Broadway – Seventh Avenue Line (1 train), opened on March 16, 2009 as a replacement to the South Ferry loops station.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is currently building four new New York City Subway stations. An extension of the IRT Flushing Line (7 <7> trains), named the 7 Subway Extension, will erect a station at 34th Street and 11th Avenue as part of the Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project. The other three stations are being built as part of the Second Avenue Subway, a long-deferred project intended to relieve congestion on the IRT Lexington Avenue Line (4 5 6 <6> trains), the busiest rapid transit corridor in the United States. The stations will be located on Second Avenue at 72nd, 86th and 96th streets.

Stations that share identical street names are disambiguated by the line name and/or the cross street each is associated with. For example, "125th Street station" can refer to four separate stations: 125th Street on the IND Eighth Avenue Line (A C E trains), the IRT Broadway – Seventh Avenue Line (1 train), the IRT Lenox Avenue Line (2 3 trains), and the IRT Lexington Avenue Line (4 5 6 <6> trains). This situation occurs numerous times.