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For anyone who’s ever staggered onto the 1 train looking like they’ve just completed a Bikram yoga class, relief may finally be on the horizon. The MTA is exploring geothermal cooling—a technology more commonly used to heat and chill buildings—as a way to keep New York’s notoriously sticky subway platforms tolerable in the summer.
In a request for information issued last week and first reported on by The City, the agency asked experts to pitch ideas for tapping into the earth’s subsurface to move and store heat. The concept is deceptively simple: Take all that stagnant, suffocating platform air and push it down into the ground, where temperatures remain relatively stable. If it works, stations could hover around 82–85 degrees on even the hottest days.
The first guinea pigs? Upper Manhattan’s 168th and 181st Street stations on the 1 line—both deep, cavernous spaces infamous for feeling like saunas. At 120 feet underground, they trap heat generated not just by braking trains but also by electronics equipment, fans, and even the A/C units inside subway cars that expel their waste heat back onto platforms.
Riders hardly need a feasibility study to confirm how brutal it can get. “It’s like a sauna, you can’t even breathe down here in the summer,” rider Veronica Bjork told The City as she waited at 181st Street. Another commuter, Maimouna Traore, put it bluntly to Gothamist: “There should be some kind of AC or some kind of circulation, especially in the summer time. People get really hot and people can pass out.”
The MTA has dabbled with cooling before. A handful of stations—Hudson Yards, the new Q line stops, South Ferry—already use mechanical “air tempering” systems. But installing traditional chillers across a 121-year-old network with 472 stations isn’t exactly plug-and-play. Geothermal, officials hope, could offer a cheaper, more energy-efficient fix that’s easier to replicate system-wide.
Of course, drilling boreholes under busy Manhattan streets isn’t simple either. Any new system must withstand constant vibration, clouds of steel dust and a 24/7 operating schedule. The MTA is gathering feedback before deciding whether to move forward, but it’s clear the status quo can’t last.
With climate models projecting triple the number of 90-degree days by the 2050s, straphangers may one day thank science—and some very deep pipes—for saving them from subway sweat lodges. Until then, pack your handheld fan and keep dreaming of geothermal bliss.