Transit Ridership Reaches Highest Since June of 1971
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The average number of daily subway and bus riders reached 7.5 million during weekdays in September, the highest average daily ridership of any month since June 1971, according to statistics New York City Transit is expected to release today.
The record benchmark is the result of a perfect combination of one-time and ongoing factors, but is itself a broader sign of confidence in the subway that has been 25 years in the making.
It’s attributable in part to a capital plan that injected billions of dollars into a system that went into sharp decline beginning in 1970. A drop in crime that made the system safer for riders played a role, as did the economic resurgence of New York that has drawn more workers and tourists into the city.
The variables that contributed to the unusually high ridership this September included unseasonably warm weather; the shock of exorbitant gasoline prices that kept people’s cars in their garages; a Jewish New Year that fell in October instead of September and kept people in school and at work, and, not least, the city’s sustained economic growth, which added 43,800 new jobs, a 1.2% increase between September 2004 and September 2005, according to New York City Transit.
Weekend ridership also reached 35-year records in September, the last month for which statistics are available. The average number of riders on Saturdays and Sundays was 7.6 million in September, a 5% increase over September 2004 and a 2.3% increase year-to-date for 2005 over 2004, according to New York City Transit numbers.
The numbers, while positive, do not surprise city planners, who see the increase in daily subway ridership as part of the city’s overall growth.
“The city as a whole is doing well, and precisely for those reasons ridership is increasing,” the director of strategic planning at the city’s Department of City Planning, Sandy Hornick, said. “In the 1970s, the city lost substantial population and has been climbing back from that for a long time.”
In May, a similar milestone was reached when 7.4 million average daily riders set a record for the highest weekday ridership since 1971.Last year, annual ridership reached 1.4 billion, a number not seen since the subway’s heyday of the 1950s.Transportation experts, however, were not completely sanguine, as they worry that increased ridership soon will overload the system’s capacity, making expansion projects like the Second Avenue subway, which received a boost of $450 million when voters approved a statewide transportation bond last Tuesday, critical.
“Our fear is that corporations and individuals are going to move elsewhere because they can live and work more easily in other locations,” the director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University, Elliot Sander, said. “That’s why we need to keep up with those numbers. If we don’t continue to modernize and expand the system, there’s going to be a disconnect.”
Such a crunch may come during the holiday shopping season between Thanksgiving and December, when riders will receive half-fare discounts on weekends as well as bonus days on unlimited ride MetroCards. In an effort to spread the holiday cheer, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released an advertising campaign yesterday featuring a Santa Claus entering the subway to educate riders about the fare discounts.
Transportation experts believe that the September figures could preface another milestone. This could be the year, some said, when the one-day record set two days before Christmas, on December 23, 1946, when 8.8 million people rode the subway for a nickel a ride, is neared if not broken. “You could see something close to that this year on the 23rd, “the associate director of the MTA’s Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, William Henderson, said. “It stands to reason that with a fare promotion and discount rides all that last week, it’s going to be a really good December for ridership.”