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So, according to Wikipedia, that unimpeachable source, the only subway systems in the world that operate 24 hours, 7 days a week are the New York City Subway, PATH, the Red and Blue lines of the Chicago L, and PATCO between Philadelphia and its New Jersey suburbs.

Anyone know of any others? Night bus networks, while nice, don't count.

(I thought of this after a conversation with

bloodstones about Chicago's Blue Line, in which she said, "All-night transit service is a mark of civilization. Sorry, Boston.")

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U S A!
U S A!
U S A!
U S A!
U S A!

There is very rare service (once an hour or so) all night in Zagreb (buses keep being buses, trams keep being trams, but they run weird routes that merge multiple routes into one - 4 routes covering the majority of the day network of track.) There is no subway, day or not.

All-night subways are indeed a great thing. Unfortunately for Boston, its subway was first in the nation, so others got to learn from its mistakes -- namely, only having one track in each direction. That means that you can't have 24-hour train service, not unless your tracks are made of fairy dust and never need maintenance.

(Running longer hours also means higher costs, and the MBTA is not exactly flush with cash right now. Try asking most commuters if they'd be willing to have the cost of a ride go up 40% so that the college kids could take the train home from the clubs at 4 am.)

Almost no systems have extra tracks. One that does, or will shortly when it opens, is line 9 in Seoul; it'll be interesting to see if that one (which goes to their airport) runs 24 hours.

I was about to say this, but you said it better.

Hell yes NYC!

Woo! Second in the nation to have a subway! Woo!

ps. yankees suck

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Jeff, I suspect, is referring to having, in general, four track wide subways. Yes, the NYC system developed from competing entities, however those systems evolved into the different lines, for instance many people still call the 4-5 the IRT. And while these did parallel each other, they weren't two feet apart from one another.

The four track wide system allows for things like express trains. Which is why, I suspect, it was done that way. Not because two different companies wanted to run trains in the exact same space.

So yes, they did it to be clever.

Even in places that don't have 24-hour service, running alternating directions on one track while the other gets worked on is SOP for off-hours maintenance. (The MBTA does this as well in some places.) No fairy dust required!

I've read in a few places that Boston did actually run 24-hour trains for a while in the 40's, but I have no good citation for it.

Yeah, the Chicago L runs 24-hours on parts of the system by running alternating directions on one-track for maintenance. Of course, the L seems to have a LOT of maintenance on weekends, which would often get frustrating, but

Do airport-only systems count? I believe the Skylink at DFW is 24 hours, and I bet there are a bunch of others.

There are a lot of airport people-mover systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airport_people_mover_systems), most of which operate during all the hours the airport operates, but I don't think that's what Wikipedia means by a city transit system, unless it actually leaves the airport and serves some substantial part of the city.

um, yeah, Boston loses out here, hardcore.

Am I completely on crack to think that London had partial 24-hour service once upon a time? I thought Sydney had had something as well, but hell if I can figure it out from their web site.

I'm in completely disagreement with the MBTA apologists above. Boston doesn't have 24-hour subway service because the people who run the system don't want it. I started liking Boston a lot better when I stopped trying to compare it with large cities and started appreciating it for what it is.

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I've read a bunch of reports that the purported cost of the Night Owl service was padded whereever possible because the MBTA really didn't want to deal with it. I don't have the information to really judge it either way, though I do think the employee roster was rather inflated.

When I did try and ride it, I saw a mixed collection of people riding the faux-Red-Line after an evening being social at parties or bars or whatever, and a huge number of service employees going home on the faux-Blue-line. (For the latter, I remember a continuous stream of packed buses just going back and forth between downtown and Maverick. That run sure looked like a money-maker, at least if anyone had been collecting fares, but I was never asked and actively blown off trying to pay, perhaps because they assumed (badly) that anyone getting on downtown was transferring.) The transfer point at downtown crossing was absolute chaos, with a ridiculous number of MBTA employees hanging out but contributing nothing apparent. (Though surely collecting overtime!) I didn't get the impression anybody at all actually cared about running an efficient service, and thus while I'd love to have real late-night public transportation in Boston, I'm perfectly happy to have the ridiculous Night Owl killed off.

worldwide? i assumed that some european cities had 24/7 subway systems.

Yeah, I'm going by Wikipedia, but I can't think of any European or Asian counterexamples. Lots of night bus networks, though.

"All-night transit service is a mark of civilization. Sorry, Boston."

ROFLMAO!

Really, why go thru so much trouble mentioning all-night operation? I'd say a rational, decent, easy to use turn-style and vending is a mark of civilization, and Boston could start fixing that, then, when profits start happening because people will *want* to use it instead of *having* to use it, all-night operation might come.

On a more serious note, I've heard it before that NYC subway system had track maintenance while the trains were *running* -- they'd slow the trains to say, once every 10 minutes, then the workers had about nine minutes to do part of it, wait for the train to pass thru, continue until they were done. Given that we have *no* 24h service, they could start with a train every 20 minutes or 15 minutes for example, which is better than nothing, and do maintenance in between. If we're talking about something so bad that they need to stop the track for hours, well then, bus people, it's not that different from when something bad happens during the day and has to be dealt with. It's just part of being a grown up, I suppose. ;-)

More like 25 minutes, but yeah, I think that's roughly how it goes. And sometimes where there's a three-track section or an express line they can hop onto, they'll skip some stops in one direction or the other for a weekend, so you have to go past and double back, which lets them do more violent things to that section of track for a few days. I'm honestly not sure how they manage serious maintenance on the two-track lines (of which there are quite a few, especially outside Manhattan), but it probably involves running shuttlebusses from station to station along the affected section.

Sometimes they alternate directions on one track and close the other. "Board all service on the Manhattan-bound platform", etc. I've spent many late hours watching this sort of work done, including reconstruction of the entire railbed on the 1/9. (There's something very satisfying about watching them cut and weld rail and then riding on it the next day.) There was certainly also some bustitution, but it was rare, and writing as someone who spent years riding the late-night subway, I only remember dealing with buses once or twice. (I think they generally only do it for fairly far-out fringe service.)

An example of single-tracking, taken from today's bulletins:

  #7 Flushing-bound trains stop at the Times Square-bound platform

  Late night, 12:01 AM to 5 AM Tuesdays and Thursdays, Jun 9 - Jul 2

  Wait for Flushing-bound service on the Times Square-bound platform at
  Vernon Blvd-Jackson Av and Hunters Point Av stations.

  Note: trains run every 20 minutes during this time.

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