The NYC subway isn&#x27;t a commuter rail system, it&#x27;s a metro, which means stops are spaced closely together - the standard interval is every 0.5 mi.<p>A maglev train is of pretty marginal benefit here - it&#x27;d be a smoother ride, but there is simply no way with the station spacing you can get up to the kinds of speeds where maglev shines. Not to mention having to account for standing passengers means stricter bounds on permissible acceleration, which further knocks down your speed gains.<p>So sure, hypothetically a maglev train line from Inwood to the Financial District would get you there in 15 minutes... without stopping, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a stretch to say that&#x27;s not a particularly useful mass transit system ;)<p>&gt; <i>&quot;You could also build the bus station 10 miles outside of the city, near the stadium, for example, and quickly get everyone into Manhattan.&quot;</i><p>Right, and this is also why maglev, while being an interesting thought exercise, ignores practically all other constraints.<p>The bottleneck getting people from NJ into Manhattan isn&#x27;t the speed of the trains, it&#x27;s the fact that all rail traffic must pass through Amtrak&#x27;s aging tunnels that suffer from poor signaling and deteriorating conditions - both of which cause frequent delays. The fact that you&#x27;re squeezing all this traffic into two tubes itself puts a pretty hard cap on the amount of capacity you have.<p>NJ-Manhattan rail links are constrained not by speed but by overall capacity. Faster moving trains present an extremely marginal gain on overall capacity, especially when they have to share space&#x2F;schedules&#x2F;speeds with non-maglev (is that even possible?) traffic.<p>There have frequently been thoughts of moving the PABT out to Secaucus where commuters can catch a frequent, fast train to transfer to Penn (or in the future, GCT), but the reality is that the Amtrak tunnels are already operating at capacity so adding a frequent shuttle service is really just a pipe dream at this point.<p>If NYC&#x2F;NJ suddenly got a big truckload of cash to invest in infrastructure, &quot;maglev trains&quot; are very, very, very far down the list. Much higher on the list (if not the very top item) would be &quot;build the damn Gateway tunnel&quot;, which will double rail capacity under the Hudson and into NJ, and make adding new NJ-Manhattan train service even a possibility.