The first 20 results for "list of nyc subway stations" does not include article "List of New York City Subway stations".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/list%20of%20nyc%20subway%20stations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Subway_stations
I assume this could be fixed by adding a redirect. is this something we should be able to do without the redirect?
Equating "NYC" and "New York City" is not something we currently try to do. For now, redirects are the best way to deal with this.
To accomplish this we'd need a thesaurus or synonym list. There are many ways of building such a thesaurus, all of which have pros and cons, especially when you expand the effort to include all languages.
For previous discussion, see T85770: Build and enable thesaurus / synonym list for search.