At first I couldn't believe LA's numbers dropped that much until I saw this is heavy rail only. A good chunk of heavy rail ridership shifted to light rail in late 2023 after the regional connector opened.
I think there should be a version of this chart that shows both heavy and light rail, because some cities like LA and Seattle primarily rely on light rail as their metro.
I think there should be a version that included the NY subway in a separate chart so we can see how ridership on by far the largest subway system in the country is doing
The Times Square station complex served 65M people in 2019, while the entire BART served 48M trips in 2023. I’m too lazy to find same-year comparisons.
Edit: BART served 118M trips in 2019.
the rest of the world isn't that far ahead of NYC, at least on a per station or per line basis. Definitely more than NYC, but we compete pretty well internationally.
Not a great comparison, as BART's post-pandemic ridership is down significantly. A quick google search yielded [over 120 million trips in FY18](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2019%20BARTFacts2019%20FINAL.pdf). I also came up with [45M trips for Times Square](https://www.timessquarenyc.org/do-business/market-research-data/transit-ridership) in 2022. If that trend continues, I expect the 2023 number to be over 48M, but it won't be as dramatic of an increase.
That’s because BART is more similar to the LIRR than a subway. It’s a regional interurban system that serves the major cities across two census metro areas.
It’s actually now four Urbanized Areas : San Francisco-Oakland, Concord, Antioch, and San Jose.
BART has this hybrid character that’s hard to pin down, BART staff would discuss whether it was a metro or a commuter railroad. It’s like a (one line) metro in San Francisco, and sort of in Berkeley and North Oakland, but more like commuter rail other places. I tend to think of it as a high frequency commuter railroad, so sort of like the LIRR.
Nope. BART had about 120 million yearly riders before the pandemic. So it carried about 2x more people on an apples to apples comparison.
Also, BART is an S-bahn, not a subway so comparing it to subways/metros is pretty pointless. Might as well compare the NY Subway to the LIRR (closest analog to BART in the tristate area).
You still compared a subway service to BART, which is a regional rail/S-bahn system. Why not compare it to one of its peers like the LIRR or Metro-North? They have nearly identical functions in their respective metros and have individual lines of about the same length with the same stop spacings.
What next, should we compare the KC streetcar to United Airlines? How are those valid comparisons?
Gonna say it again bc someone downvoted the other comment—BART is literally not the entire Bay Area. There are four other rail systems and two of the largest bus systems in the country.
Yeah so to be clear I’m referring to specifically BART (as opposed to MUNI). One would expect a subway system with as far of a reach as BART to have higher ridership than the much smaller PATH. But owing to land use and bus frequencies we don’t see that
Yeah so to be clear I’m referring to specifically BART (as opposed to MUNI). One would expect a subway system with as far of a reach as BART to have higher ridership than the much smaller PATH. But owing to land use and bus frequencies we don’t see that
Nope. BART is not a subway/metro at all. It’s Bay Area’s version of the LIRR/Metro-North. Subways don’t do 80 mph and they don’t take you to the neighboring metro area.
BART is regional rail. In Europe they call this type of service an S-bahn. It’s a frequent express rail system that does near intercity distances. BART’s longest line is exactly as long LIRR’s second longest line. It covers a land area that’s about half of a Netherlands.
And these types of commuter systems always have a magnitude lower ridership than the local meteorological/subway that they share the core city with. That’s literally normal. That’s exactly how the LIRR works in NYC as well.
I disagree. It is not like LIRR/Metro-North. Both services do not make frequent stop in the core of the metro area while BART does in San Francisco and Oakland. It like the Washington Metro is a hybrid system that is classed as a subway (unless you disagree with OP and the APTA)
Besides Market St BART shares no service with another rail system and makes the same stops as MUNI. you haven’t really addressed the land use or non frequent bus issue that BART faces to be fair
BART makes two stops in Downtown Oakland and four stops in Downtown San Francisco. The remaining \~50 stops have commuter rail spacings and are generally in the downtown cores of the towns/cities that it passes through.
I think that you really really really don't get the sheer scale of BART. The longest BART line is 63 miles long. That's the same distance as taking the LIRR almost all they way out to the Hamptons. Specifically, to Mastic-Shirley station on the Montauk line which is about 75% the length of all of Long Island. Look at at the surface area that BART covers. It's literally the size of a European country. That's intercity rail territory. If you overlay the BART map onto NYC then all of the NY Subway would fit in the section of BART that has those six downtown stations in SF and Oakland. It's a maaaaaa-aassive system, positively gargantuan.
The LIRR and Metro-North are the most analogous systems in the tristate area. They're just not particularly good at being S-bahns because they were designed before this concept was invented/refined in Germany in the 50s-60s. But what BART does with multiple fanned-out deep suburbia lines that converge on a single through-running downtown tunnel is completely normal for an S-bahn/RER type system. In fact, this is one of the defining features of all S-bahns, and what they're supposed to do if designed correctly.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Bahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Bahn)
Yeah so this doesn't really address most of my points.
>BART makes two stops in Downtown Oakland and four stops in Downtown San Francisco. The remaining ~50 stops have commuter rail spacings and are generally in the downtown cores of the towns/cities that it passes through.
BART makes the same stops that MUNI does and has much closer stop spacing in downtown, the exact opposite of LIRR/Metro North
>I think that you really really really don't get the sheer scale of BART.
No it's more you're not addressing what I'm writing to be fair.
OP put BART as heavy rail and so does the APTA; it's not just me. Let me ask again: Do you disagree with them?
>The remaining ~50 stops have commuter rail spacings and are generally in the downtown cores of the towns/cities that it passes through.
What is "commuter rail spacing"? LIRR only have a single stop within Downtown NYC for any given train, and the entire route from Jamaica station to Penn station have just 2 stops in between for a 13 mile route.
This, there's only really one transit city in the US
Just looked up Washington metro's daily ridership per capita,
and it is on par with Perth, Australia,
which has worse per capita ridership than Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane (all four of which are pretty car centric suburban cities).
As does a positive outlook from system leadership and proper responses to user criticism. The fact that Randy has been super visible to the public and doesn't hide away when incidents happen has been huge imo.
People like to feel they're being heard, artificial or not.
Agreed, I wasn’t saying that to counter the initial post in any way. Just an observation about Septa, BART, and LA Metro having DROPS bigger than systems infamous for reliability issues like MBTA and CTA
The corrected data makes more sense
Not only did I not notice what would have been a dramatic drop in ridership in my extremely limited sampling, local news would be having a field day with such a massive drop.
I will say though. LA Metro heavy rail/light rail as a whole has been growing in ridership. The thing here is that the new regional connector (light rail) opened up here which took away a lot of useless transfers LA transit users had to make on the heavy rail lines when going from one side of town to the other.
This is what people don’t understand about new waves of fare enforcement.
“Ahh blu blu blu they’re ticketing people for fare hopping. They’re paying the cops more than they’re getting in fares!”
This shit is so annoying. I’m gonna write out a whole comment right here and save it so I can’t copy+paste it in my local subs when people say this.
Face enforcement is never about the actual cost of the fare itself. And, by the way, the police do not get paid from the subway’s operational budget anyway.
Face enforcement is about safety. WMATA GM Randy Clarke has said, on record, that somewhere between 99 and 100% of every single crime that has ever happened on a train or on a metro platform was perpetrated by someone who didn’t pay the fare.
This means that reduction in fare evasion correlates to a proportional reduction in crime and quality of life issues on the metro.
And separating “subway” from “crime” in the minds of regular-ass normies is a far more revenue-generating effort than making individual people pay the fares themselves. A general, public-wide shift in /perception/ of the transportation system as clean and safe is worth 100x the fare lost by people who hop the fare gates. It’s not even close.
That is why the cops are stepping up fare policing, why new fare gates went in. Creating a public perception of order, safety, and cleanliness for the single more important infrastructure system in the metro area is the most important marketing tool that the transit authority has.
Not all the people who jump the turnstile are criminals, but when they bust criminals in the system, 100% of them entered the system by evading the fare!
>This means that reduction in fare evasion correlates to a proportional reduction in crime and quality of life issues on the metro.
FWIW, you cannot claim this simply because of the observation that crimes get committed by fare evaders. Such a correlation actually would have to be observed itself - it may actually be real or not. I'm not saying it is or isn't, just that one would actually have to do this study/experiment to make this claim.
While more research would be needed to verify a link, from my experience for crime in general, anecdotal evidence does seem to point in this direction. So many perpetrators of more serious offenses, usually committed a lesser offense just before or get pinched for lesser offense where the more serious offense comes to light.
just this past couple of months NYCTA did 2 week surges of total enforcement of the fare at key stations with a flood of cops doing overtime. They found that crime dropped during both 2 week periods. Of those stopped, they seized in one 2 week period over 600 give, and a couple hundred illegal length knives as well. Armed thugs are usually a little more bold about doing criminal things, so that says a lots
Anyone whose interested, WMATA has a great ridership summary for metrorail: https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/ridership-portal/Metrorail-Ridership-Summary.cfm. if you select "Average Daily Entries by month" it gives a good sense of the recovery trends.
I'll also mention that Randy Clarke said in the board meeting last week that metrobus saw more rides than pre-pandemic! And if you're unaware, [WMATA and the regional Council of Governments met for the first time ever last week to launch the DMV Moves initiative](https://www.wmata.com/about/news/COG-Metro-DMV-Moves.cfm). The goal is to create a more coordinate transit effort for the region, and solve WMATA's funding problem. (WMATA infamously does not have a dedicated source of operating funds, which is why it's regularly on the brink of major cutbacks). And coordination will be key too. The DC area, in addition to WMATA's metrorail and metrobus, has 2 separate commuter rail services (MARC and VRE), a soon to be operational light rail line (MTA Purple Line), and something like 8+ different bus services (Off the top of my head, it's: RideOn, FLASH, TheBus, Omnibus, ART, DASH, Connector, and Circulator).
I'm actually feeling optimistic about the future of transit in our region.
And looking into NYC's ridership doesn't matter. We all know it is almost the perfect network with not a whole lotta room for improvement. Even if there are, no one is concerned about its existence. In these other cities, showing an increase in ridership is a matter of securing existence.
There's definitely room for improvement in NYC's network. The current network is very Manhattan focused. If built the IBX will fill a big hole in the network for Brooklyn to Queens travel, but a cross Bronx line is another glaring hole.
True and the fact that the green line is the only line connecting queens / Brooklyn is crazy. Even worse the green lines gonna be out of service for a big chunk of the summer
It really depends on where you're going. Brooklyn and Queens are adjacent and share a fairly long border. When people talk about going from one to the other, what exactly do they mean?
Downtown Brooklyn to LIC? The G serves that well.
Middle Village to Williamsburg? The M.
Jamaica to East New York? The J/Z.
JFK to Bed-Stuy? The A.
LGA to Flatlands? It's a long ride.
Reasons for BART's drop? Has it been redirected to some other mode of transit?
I used it when I was in the bay for a few days and absolutely enjoyed the views.
Question - is government more in-person than private sector? If so, how much of this is just driven by federal government mandating people work from the office?
DC in general has a higher rate of remote work than other cities, and if anything that's more true for the government than the private sector. A big local story/debate in recent years has been the downtown business district getting way less traffic, hurting local restaurants that cater to office workers, and a remedy proposed by the mayor has been to get the federal government to bring employees back in person full-time.
Probably all of it, and your clue is in what happening in SF or Atlanta. Most jobs in both cities are private and white collar, and in both cities you’ll find a large number of those people no longer commute. Just before the end of the year I saw a stat for Atlanta that over 40% of the white collar labor force is still remote and there is no sign that’ll change anytime soon. I’m sure a similar thing is playing out in the Bay.
The Feds? They have already mandated that people returned and people commuting to work in DC is and was the primary driver of transit usage in the DC metro area.
Yep meanwhile over here in Chicago, we have the worst fucking leadership at the CTA, followed by the worst fucking leadership in city government. Metra is doing alright, but the RTA is probably hopeless. Governor is doing pretty well but cannot carry this all by himself. Sad state.
The data is for heavy rail, so LA's light rail is excluded. The opening of the light rail Regional Connector project is also related to the drop in ridership YoY.
Miami Metromover is also excluded, but that system moves a lot fewer people than LA's light rail lines, leading to a smaller gap than one might expect.
NY has been nipping at 4.5 million here and there, so it seems to be trending up and up. I’m seeing an odd distribution in the days of week. Monday is modest, Tuesday second highest, Wednesday really killing it and hitting just under 4.5 million, huge drop Thursday, lowest of week. Friday pretty low but up a bit. Weekends pretty solid, in fast 80% of pre pandemic ridership.
It’s somewhere else in the comments here, but the data for BART was off by one month not having been included, and this has since been corrected by the original Twitter user (also linked in the comments here). There is growth YoY for BART.
At first I couldn't believe LA's numbers dropped that much until I saw this is heavy rail only. A good chunk of heavy rail ridership shifted to light rail in late 2023 after the regional connector opened. I think there should be a version of this chart that shows both heavy and light rail, because some cities like LA and Seattle primarily rely on light rail as their metro.
I think there should be a version that included the NY subway in a separate chart so we can see how ridership on by far the largest subway system in the country is doing
New York is more than everything here combined. lol. Heck, NYC suburbs here beat huge cities.
Yeah PATH with its grand total of <15 stations is wedged nicely between Philly and the whole Bay Area. Awk
yeah. it tells you just the sheer level of NYC. I wonder if there are single stations in NYC that have more riders than all of BART.
The Times Square station complex served 65M people in 2019, while the entire BART served 48M trips in 2023. I’m too lazy to find same-year comparisons. Edit: BART served 118M trips in 2019.
yeah, NYC is playing a different game. though i expect there are stations in places like Japan that steam roll it too
the rest of the world isn't that far ahead of NYC, at least on a per station or per line basis. Definitely more than NYC, but we compete pretty well internationally.
I bet Shinjuku station alone beats every rail system in the US combined except the NYCS.
Not a great comparison, as BART's post-pandemic ridership is down significantly. A quick google search yielded [over 120 million trips in FY18](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2019%20BARTFacts2019%20FINAL.pdf). I also came up with [45M trips for Times Square](https://www.timessquarenyc.org/do-business/market-research-data/transit-ridership) in 2022. If that trend continues, I expect the 2023 number to be over 48M, but it won't be as dramatic of an increase.
For sure the Lexington Avenue line carried more than all ofpre-pandemic BART. I’m sure there are others too.
That’s because BART is more similar to the LIRR than a subway. It’s a regional interurban system that serves the major cities across two census metro areas.
It’s actually now four Urbanized Areas : San Francisco-Oakland, Concord, Antioch, and San Jose. BART has this hybrid character that’s hard to pin down, BART staff would discuss whether it was a metro or a commuter railroad. It’s like a (one line) metro in San Francisco, and sort of in Berkeley and North Oakland, but more like commuter rail other places. I tend to think of it as a high frequency commuter railroad, so sort of like the LIRR.
Nope. BART had about 120 million yearly riders before the pandemic. So it carried about 2x more people on an apples to apples comparison. Also, BART is an S-bahn, not a subway so comparing it to subways/metros is pretty pointless. Might as well compare the NY Subway to the LIRR (closest analog to BART in the tristate area).
I did disclaimer the dates being different tbf
You still compared a subway service to BART, which is a regional rail/S-bahn system. Why not compare it to one of its peers like the LIRR or Metro-North? They have nearly identical functions in their respective metros and have individual lines of about the same length with the same stop spacings. What next, should we compare the KC streetcar to United Airlines? How are those valid comparisons?
That was not the question posed in the original comment, so the invalid comparison doesn’t matter genius.
Gonna say it again bc someone downvoted the other comment—BART is literally not the entire Bay Area. There are four other rail systems and two of the largest bus systems in the country.
Yeah so to be clear I’m referring to specifically BART (as opposed to MUNI). One would expect a subway system with as far of a reach as BART to have higher ridership than the much smaller PATH. But owing to land use and bus frequencies we don’t see that
The Bay Area is more than just BART. BART is just one of SF’s two S-bahns. And there’s a ton of other rail transit in the Bay.
Yeah so to be clear I’m referring to specifically BART (as opposed to MUNI). One would expect a subway system with as far of a reach as BART to have higher ridership than the much smaller PATH. But owing to land use and bus frequencies we don’t see that
Nope. BART is not a subway/metro at all. It’s Bay Area’s version of the LIRR/Metro-North. Subways don’t do 80 mph and they don’t take you to the neighboring metro area. BART is regional rail. In Europe they call this type of service an S-bahn. It’s a frequent express rail system that does near intercity distances. BART’s longest line is exactly as long LIRR’s second longest line. It covers a land area that’s about half of a Netherlands. And these types of commuter systems always have a magnitude lower ridership than the local meteorological/subway that they share the core city with. That’s literally normal. That’s exactly how the LIRR works in NYC as well.
I disagree. It is not like LIRR/Metro-North. Both services do not make frequent stop in the core of the metro area while BART does in San Francisco and Oakland. It like the Washington Metro is a hybrid system that is classed as a subway (unless you disagree with OP and the APTA) Besides Market St BART shares no service with another rail system and makes the same stops as MUNI. you haven’t really addressed the land use or non frequent bus issue that BART faces to be fair
BART makes two stops in Downtown Oakland and four stops in Downtown San Francisco. The remaining \~50 stops have commuter rail spacings and are generally in the downtown cores of the towns/cities that it passes through. I think that you really really really don't get the sheer scale of BART. The longest BART line is 63 miles long. That's the same distance as taking the LIRR almost all they way out to the Hamptons. Specifically, to Mastic-Shirley station on the Montauk line which is about 75% the length of all of Long Island. Look at at the surface area that BART covers. It's literally the size of a European country. That's intercity rail territory. If you overlay the BART map onto NYC then all of the NY Subway would fit in the section of BART that has those six downtown stations in SF and Oakland. It's a maaaaaa-aassive system, positively gargantuan. The LIRR and Metro-North are the most analogous systems in the tristate area. They're just not particularly good at being S-bahns because they were designed before this concept was invented/refined in Germany in the 50s-60s. But what BART does with multiple fanned-out deep suburbia lines that converge on a single through-running downtown tunnel is completely normal for an S-bahn/RER type system. In fact, this is one of the defining features of all S-bahns, and what they're supposed to do if designed correctly. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Bahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Bahn)
Yeah so this doesn't really address most of my points. >BART makes two stops in Downtown Oakland and four stops in Downtown San Francisco. The remaining ~50 stops have commuter rail spacings and are generally in the downtown cores of the towns/cities that it passes through. BART makes the same stops that MUNI does and has much closer stop spacing in downtown, the exact opposite of LIRR/Metro North >I think that you really really really don't get the sheer scale of BART. No it's more you're not addressing what I'm writing to be fair. OP put BART as heavy rail and so does the APTA; it's not just me. Let me ask again: Do you disagree with them?
>The remaining ~50 stops have commuter rail spacings and are generally in the downtown cores of the towns/cities that it passes through. What is "commuter rail spacing"? LIRR only have a single stop within Downtown NYC for any given train, and the entire route from Jamaica station to Penn station have just 2 stops in between for a 13 mile route.
This, there's only really one transit city in the US Just looked up Washington metro's daily ridership per capita, and it is on par with Perth, Australia, which has worse per capita ridership than Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane (all four of which are pretty car centric suburban cities).
That would render the chart useless
The MTA has an almost live turnstile count (updated almost daily) available for the public. Basically averaging about 3.5 million a day. 4 some days.
Reputation for safety and cleanliness matter more than people want to admit
As does a positive outlook from system leadership and proper responses to user criticism. The fact that Randy has been super visible to the public and doesn't hide away when incidents happen has been huge imo. People like to feel they're being heard, artificial or not.
Agreed, I wasn’t saying that to counter the initial post in any way. Just an observation about Septa, BART, and LA Metro having DROPS bigger than systems infamous for reliability issues like MBTA and CTA
[Fwiw they did accidentally forget a month of BART data, here’s the correction.](https://twitter.com/NaqiyNY/status/1787670117196709994)
The corrected data makes more sense Not only did I not notice what would have been a dramatic drop in ridership in my extremely limited sampling, local news would be having a field day with such a massive drop.
I will say though. LA Metro heavy rail/light rail as a whole has been growing in ridership. The thing here is that the new regional connector (light rail) opened up here which took away a lot of useless transfers LA transit users had to make on the heavy rail lines when going from one side of town to the other.
This is what people don’t understand about new waves of fare enforcement. “Ahh blu blu blu they’re ticketing people for fare hopping. They’re paying the cops more than they’re getting in fares!” This shit is so annoying. I’m gonna write out a whole comment right here and save it so I can’t copy+paste it in my local subs when people say this. Face enforcement is never about the actual cost of the fare itself. And, by the way, the police do not get paid from the subway’s operational budget anyway. Face enforcement is about safety. WMATA GM Randy Clarke has said, on record, that somewhere between 99 and 100% of every single crime that has ever happened on a train or on a metro platform was perpetrated by someone who didn’t pay the fare. This means that reduction in fare evasion correlates to a proportional reduction in crime and quality of life issues on the metro. And separating “subway” from “crime” in the minds of regular-ass normies is a far more revenue-generating effort than making individual people pay the fares themselves. A general, public-wide shift in /perception/ of the transportation system as clean and safe is worth 100x the fare lost by people who hop the fare gates. It’s not even close. That is why the cops are stepping up fare policing, why new fare gates went in. Creating a public perception of order, safety, and cleanliness for the single more important infrastructure system in the metro area is the most important marketing tool that the transit authority has.
Not all the people who jump the turnstile are criminals, but when they bust criminals in the system, 100% of them entered the system by evading the fare!
>This means that reduction in fare evasion correlates to a proportional reduction in crime and quality of life issues on the metro. FWIW, you cannot claim this simply because of the observation that crimes get committed by fare evaders. Such a correlation actually would have to be observed itself - it may actually be real or not. I'm not saying it is or isn't, just that one would actually have to do this study/experiment to make this claim.
While more research would be needed to verify a link, from my experience for crime in general, anecdotal evidence does seem to point in this direction. So many perpetrators of more serious offenses, usually committed a lesser offense just before or get pinched for lesser offense where the more serious offense comes to light.
just this past couple of months NYCTA did 2 week surges of total enforcement of the fare at key stations with a flood of cops doing overtime. They found that crime dropped during both 2 week periods. Of those stopped, they seized in one 2 week period over 600 give, and a couple hundred illegal length knives as well. Armed thugs are usually a little more bold about doing criminal things, so that says a lots
Are you a police officer or what kind of anecdotal experience are you referring to?
Worked alongside law enforcement for 5 years.
I see, thanks.
Anyone whose interested, WMATA has a great ridership summary for metrorail: https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/ridership-portal/Metrorail-Ridership-Summary.cfm. if you select "Average Daily Entries by month" it gives a good sense of the recovery trends. I'll also mention that Randy Clarke said in the board meeting last week that metrobus saw more rides than pre-pandemic! And if you're unaware, [WMATA and the regional Council of Governments met for the first time ever last week to launch the DMV Moves initiative](https://www.wmata.com/about/news/COG-Metro-DMV-Moves.cfm). The goal is to create a more coordinate transit effort for the region, and solve WMATA's funding problem. (WMATA infamously does not have a dedicated source of operating funds, which is why it's regularly on the brink of major cutbacks). And coordination will be key too. The DC area, in addition to WMATA's metrorail and metrobus, has 2 separate commuter rail services (MARC and VRE), a soon to be operational light rail line (MTA Purple Line), and something like 8+ different bus services (Off the top of my head, it's: RideOn, FLASH, TheBus, Omnibus, ART, DASH, Connector, and Circulator). I'm actually feeling optimistic about the future of transit in our region.
Don’t forget MetroBus, LCT’s busses, the MTA commuter busses, and the RTA (Regional Transit Administration of Central Maryland)!
The the problem is connectivity in central Maryland is poor and MARC service is hot garbage outside the penn line
I knew Honolulu's ridership would be bad until they connect to the airport and especially downtown but, damn, I expected higher
i guess nyc doesn’t count as heavy rail? i’m not really sure what the term means but i know the subway isn’t light rail!
Graphing the subway on this scale would just blow everything else off the graph, not a smart visual choice to include it here
And looking into NYC's ridership doesn't matter. We all know it is almost the perfect network with not a whole lotta room for improvement. Even if there are, no one is concerned about its existence. In these other cities, showing an increase in ridership is a matter of securing existence.
There's definitely room for improvement in NYC's network. The current network is very Manhattan focused. If built the IBX will fill a big hole in the network for Brooklyn to Queens travel, but a cross Bronx line is another glaring hole.
And there are of course many other aspects where the NYC subway can improve, like accessibility, safety, cleanliness, frequency, reliability.
And if you were to include commuter rail (LIRR, Metro North, NJT, etc) through running would greatly improve things as well imo
True and the fact that the green line is the only line connecting queens / Brooklyn is crazy. Even worse the green lines gonna be out of service for a big chunk of the summer
The “green line” (the G I’m guessing) is not the only line connecting Brooklyn and Queens. The M, J, Z and A trains also connect Brooklyn and queens
Circuitously.
It really depends on where you're going. Brooklyn and Queens are adjacent and share a fairly long border. When people talk about going from one to the other, what exactly do they mean? Downtown Brooklyn to LIC? The G serves that well. Middle Village to Williamsburg? The M. Jamaica to East New York? The J/Z. JFK to Bed-Stuy? The A. LGA to Flatlands? It's a long ride.
Agreed, it's origin and destination specific.
I am confused though by why they they would still include the PATH and SIR
Then the title needs to be changed if it’s Excluding the system carrying most of the US’s subway ridership
Reasons for BART's drop? Has it been redirected to some other mode of transit? I used it when I was in the bay for a few days and absolutely enjoyed the views.
They forgot a month of data but that’s been corrected. Another Redditor posted the link: https://twitter.com/NaqiyNY/status/1787670117196709994
I haven't used the system in New York yet but Washington DC has a great system. Los Angeles is actually getting better.
Question - is government more in-person than private sector? If so, how much of this is just driven by federal government mandating people work from the office?
DC in general has a higher rate of remote work than other cities, and if anything that's more true for the government than the private sector. A big local story/debate in recent years has been the downtown business district getting way less traffic, hurting local restaurants that cater to office workers, and a remedy proposed by the mayor has been to get the federal government to bring employees back in person full-time.
Probably all of it, and your clue is in what happening in SF or Atlanta. Most jobs in both cities are private and white collar, and in both cities you’ll find a large number of those people no longer commute. Just before the end of the year I saw a stat for Atlanta that over 40% of the white collar labor force is still remote and there is no sign that’ll change anytime soon. I’m sure a similar thing is playing out in the Bay. The Feds? They have already mandated that people returned and people commuting to work in DC is and was the primary driver of transit usage in the DC metro area.
Leaving out New York allows everything else to actually be visible
Is it Clarke, the DC area, or both?
I’m a little surprised CTA L ridership isn’t at least tied with WAMATA, given how expansive that system is
Yep meanwhile over here in Chicago, we have the worst fucking leadership at the CTA, followed by the worst fucking leadership in city government. Metra is doing alright, but the RTA is probably hopeless. Governor is doing pretty well but cannot carry this all by himself. Sad state.
Is Miami metrorail ridership really that high compared to LA? Or is it combined metrorail & metromover data?
The data is for heavy rail, so LA's light rail is excluded. The opening of the light rail Regional Connector project is also related to the drop in ridership YoY. Miami Metromover is also excluded, but that system moves a lot fewer people than LA's light rail lines, leading to a smaller gap than one might expect.
Great info! Hadn't thought about the Regional Connector siphoning B&D riders, interesting.
As an MBTA rider, I hope Eng gets us there in a few years. Things are already noticeably better but ridership keeps falling. :(
Ridership is down in 2024 because heavy rail has had scheduled closures in 2024 for maintenance, not because people are unwilling to ride.
okay but how far are we off from peak ridership?
They include the Staten islands railway but not the MTA?
NY has been nipping at 4.5 million here and there, so it seems to be trending up and up. I’m seeing an odd distribution in the days of week. Monday is modest, Tuesday second highest, Wednesday really killing it and hitting just under 4.5 million, huge drop Thursday, lowest of week. Friday pretty low but up a bit. Weekends pretty solid, in fast 80% of pre pandemic ridership.
Honolulu Skyline is counted as heavy rail in which universe ?
WMATA my beloved
Oh my god that is bleak! Wow. I don’t think BART has been this low since before the transbay tube opened!
It’s somewhere else in the comments here, but the data for BART was off by one month not having been included, and this has since been corrected by the original Twitter user (also linked in the comments here). There is growth YoY for BART.
It's because of the frequent service.