At one point or another, most straphangers end up dozing off in the subway. Perhaps it’s a beer-induced haze of sleep; perhaps it’s just shut-eye on the way home with a trusted companion or significant other to watch over your stuff; perhaps it’s a wave of sleep that you just can’t escape. Any way you slice, you wake up feeling a little groggy but perhaps a little more ready to tackle the next few hours of the day.
That sleep, however, is not a particularly restful one, The New York Times has discovered. Doctors who study sleep say that dozing on the subway is more akin to nodding off than to the sleep we need over it. In fact, during their 20-minute commutes, straphangers never fall into a particularly deep sleep, and even still, light and noise interrupt that rest. “I suspect all you get is Stage 1 sleep; it’s not going to be restorative,” Carl Brazil, a sleep specialist, said. “It’s kind of wasted sleep.”
It’s not, of course, wasted sleep for pickpockets who target the drunk, and in fact, it can be costly sleep when you awake three neighborhoods and eight subway stops away from your intended destination. But with the lull of the train and the peace after a long day, sometimes that sleep, like MTA service delays, is just unavoidable.
In Washington, DC, escalators that bring passengers up from the depths of the Metro caverns are seemingly a necessity. No one wants to hike up the 204 feet from the platform at Woodley Park to Connecticut Ave. at street level. Yet, these escalators are often plagued by outages as one or another break down frequently. In New York, it’s much the same story.
