Maeve Higgins: On New York's subway, everyone in this great city is equal

New Yorkers may have to look a little harder today for a sense of belonging, but it is all around in the old subway tunnels

'Chorus', by Ann Hamilton, a marble mosaic with text from the Declaration of Independence and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, at Cortlandt St subway station, New York City. Picture: Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

This is an exciting time for me, professionally, because, on Tuesday, February 1, my second collection of essays will be published in the US. The book is titled Tell Everyone On This Train I Love Them, and one of the essays reads a little like a love letter to the New York City subway. I wrote about how, for $2.75, you can travel the length and breadth of this great city, emerging from the depths up to wholly different neighbourhoods within minutes.

I tend to romanticise public transport and the subway is this country’s largest public transportation system. I want to see it as a place where everyone, whatever our backgrounds or ethnicities or projected futures, is more or less equal to each other. I wrote that essay a couple of years ago when the subway was in quite a different place. Today, that rosy vision is difficult to hold onto, and I worry that the subway is doing less rumbling and more crumbling. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the MTA, operates the subway and reported that after a 90% drop in ridership in the early days of the pandemic, weekday subway ridership in November of last year had reached about 56% of pre-pandemic levels, with 3.1m riders on an average day.