Transportation
The Worst Place to Be on a Hot Summer Day? A New York Subway Platform
This is way more unbearable than standing on black asphalt in the blazing sun.
From the mechanically chilled comfort of the Washington Metro system, it's easy to forget that many subway systems downright defy central cooling. You can't, for instance, just install a bunch of air conditioners in a hundred-year-old porous underground network. (Washington's platforms, for the record, technically aren't air-conditioned; they use "chilled water air handling units").
The result in a city like New York is that the platform at, say, 14th Street/Union Square, may be perceptibly more miserable than the street above on a scorching day. As of this writing, it's about 85 degrees in New York. On the 14th Street platform of the L line? 99 degrees.