By Steve Sailer • Unz Review • April 10, 2020
So, the monthly excess death toll in NYC in the month up through April 4, 2020 is about twice as bad as September 2001.
From the New York Times a couple of days ago:
41 Transit Workers Dead: Crisis Takes Staggering Toll on Subways
The M.T.A. has been criticized for its response to the outbreak. Now a staffing shortage has made it difficult to keep even a diminished system running.
By Christina Goldbaum, April 8, 2020
At least 41 transit workers have died, and more than 6,000 more have fallen sick or self-quarantined. Crew shortages have caused over 800 subway delays and forced 40 percent of train trips to be canceled in a single day. On one line the average wait time, usually a few minutes, ballooned to as high as 40 minutes.
Ideally, the NYC subway system could respond to an epidemic by running more trains to reduce crowding. But illness among its workers means fewer, more jammed trains, which increase the likely infectiousness risk of each.
I hadn’t realized how the NYC subway is an order of magnitude busier than the biggest “heavy rail” (i.e., subways or elevateds with their own right of ways) systems of the next tier, D.C. and Chicago.
City/Area served
Annual ridership
Avg. weekday ridership
System
Rider. per mile(2019)[1]
(Q4 2019)[1]
lengthNew York City
2,274,960,100
9,117,400
245 miles (394 km)[2]
37,214Washington, D.C.
237,701,100
816,700
117 miles (188 km)[4]
6,980Chicago
218,467,000
695,300
102.8 miles (165.4 km)[5]
6,764Boston
152,339,700
475,300
38 miles (61 km)[6]
12,508San Francisco Bay Area
123,510,000
421,100
112 miles (180 km)[7]
3,760Manhattan; Hudson County, and Newark
90,276,600
306,700
13.8 miles (22.2 km)[10][11]
22,225Philadelphia
90,240,800
329,200
36.7 miles (59.1 km)[14][15]
8,970Atlanta
63,998,500
175,338[note 5]
47.6 miles (76.6 km)
3,684Los Angeles
41,775,100
130,900
17.4 miles (28.0 km)[20]
7,523Miami
18,073,100
62,600
24.4 miles (39.3 km)[21]
2,566Philadelphia, southern New Jersey
11,107,500
38,400
14.2 miles (22.9 km)[23]
2,704Staten Island (New York City)
7,741,000
28,500
14 miles (23 km)[2]
2,036Baltimore
7,325,500
36,600
15.5 miles (24.9 km)[25]
2,361Cleveland
5,958,000
15,900
19 miles (31 km)[27]
837San Juan
5,233,900
20,300
10.7 miles (17.2 km)[29]
1,897
Other cities rely more on buses, but NYC has a huge number of buses too.
Basically, NYC has the fewest people with their own private cars.
My guess is that dangers of infection correlate with number of people standing in the mass transit vehicle and perhaps with straphanging. My vague recollection is subways tend to have more floor space for standing than for sitting, while buses have more floor space devoted to sitting than standing, while commuter trains try to be all sitting.
This unfortunate event will cause some trouble for mass transit enthusiasts.