Our fellow Metro-North blogger Station Stops wonders why Metro-North doesn’t offer hotspots for wireless webcrawling. He notes that the Gotham Gazette addressed this issue with a well-researched article way back in 2004, when laptops were the size of suitcases and hotspots were something only women over the age of 50 got. (Sorry, sorry.)

Writes the Gazette:

The resource is already being provided for public transportation and commuter rail users in such major cities as London, Paris, Seattle, the Bay Area, Tokyo, and Chennai, India. Lufthansa and other airlines are also already offering Wi-Fi upwards of six miles in the air.

New York City, in comparison, provides Wi-Fi on no transportation mode other than the Hampton Jitney and the LimoLiner luxury bus to Boston. The MTA has responded to queries that it has no intention of providing wireless Internet resources.

Station Stops’ short answer seems to be a dash of ignorance on Metro-North’s part as to what its riders want, some serious financial hurdles, and the simple fact that the seats typically don’t offer enough room to flip open a laptop.

…here’s another killer on the New Haven Line: Only the face-to-face seats near the exit doors allow enough forward space to even *open* a notebook computer. Wifi on today’s New Haven Line could never recoup the costs for this single reason alone.

That, and most riders would rather sleep or sip a beer–two exercises that are generally frowned upon at work.