Curbed New York, 4/16/24
The Hardest-Working Turnstile in the Subway It makes about 3 million spins a year.
This is turnstile No. 602 in Fare Control Area R238, at one of the entries to the Grand Central–42nd Street subway station. It looks about the same as every other one in the subway system, but it has a special distinction: It’s probably the hardest-working turnstile in the city. That “probably” is owed to some quirks of record-keeping on the part of the MTA — MetroCard swipes and OMNY taps are counted separately, among other things — and the agency can’t absolutely confirm it, but based on the best available data, this is the stainless-steel king.
Its busyness is not hard to figure out. This turnstile is at the bottom of the escalators as you come down from Grand Central Terminal, directly ahead, the literal path of least resistance. Its three arms — known as the tripod — spun forward more than a million and a half times in 2023, recording 831,500 swipes and over 759,000 taps, and presumably made about the same number of turns as people exited. That’s about 3 million turns per year. (Or, to be precise about it, one-third turns, back and forth.)
SNIP
. . . Some of those turnstiles have probably been out there over 30 years now.”
No. 602, in fact, is one of them, and if you look closely at it, you’ll spot one detail (missing from the turnstiles installed later) that amounts to a ghost in the machine. Down at about knee level, on the right side as you enter, it has a little notch covered by a flap engraved with the words TOKEN RETURN.
