Transit Authority
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Q: I recently took a late night Metro-North train on the New Haven line and was surprised to see so many people leaving the city after midnight. I know the railroad recently began offering more late night service, but I was wondering if my experience was a fluke?
A: If Metro-North statistics culled from the last three weeks are any guide, your experience is typical. More people are leaving on late trains. For Metro-North, the maxim is, If you offer more service, more people will use it. Beginning earlier this month, the last departing trains on Metro-North’s three lines – the Hudson, Harlem, and New Haven lines – are scheduled to leave roughly 30 minutes later in the evening, at around 2 a.m. The increase in ridership, especially on weekends, has been dramatic, according to figures released by Metro-North last week, which suggests that providing more service encourages greater ridership. During the last hour of service, which is now 1 a.m. to 2 a.m., the average number of riders on each train jumped on all three lines. On the Hudson, average ridership was up 50%, to 600 from 400; on the Harlem, the number of riders grew 30%, to 1,100 from 850, and the New Haven line saw the greatest increase in average ridership on latenight trains, 120%, to 1,600 passengers from 725 passengers. Railroad officials, who had been planning to increase the number of trains for years, expect those numbers to grow as more people learn that trains leave later.
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