NYC: MTA Records Highest Modern One-Day Subway Ridership [View all]

from the MTA:



Preliminary data shows the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) reached a new modern record when 6,217,621 customers entered the MTA New York City Transit subway system on Oct. 29. The subway system carried 50,000 more customers that day than at its previous record peak, just one year earlier.

“The relentless growth in subway ridership shows how this century-old network is critical to New York’s future,” said MTA Chairman and CEO Thomas F. Prendergast. “Our challenge is to maintain and improve the subways even as growing ridership puts more demands on the system. We are doing it thanks to the MTA Capital Program, which will allow us to bring meaningful improvements to our customers, such as real time arrival information on the lettered subway lines, cleaner and brighter stations with new technology like Help Points, modern signal systems, and almost 1,000 new subway cars.”

The new modern ridership record was set on the last Thursday in October, traditionally one of the system’s busiest days. The previous record of 6,167,165 was set Oct. 30, 2014. The new record day was one of five days in October when ridership exceeded the prior year’s record, and was one of 15 weekdays with ridership above 6 million. Daily subway ridership records have been kept since 1985, but the new record is believed to be the highest since the late 1940s.

October 2015’s average weekday subway ridership of 5.974 million was the highest of any month in over 45 years, and was 1.4 percent higher than October 2014. Approximately 80,000 more customers rode the subway on an average October 2015 weekday than just a year earlier – enough to fill more than 50 fully-loaded subway trains. ...............(more)

http://www.masstransitmag.com/press_release/12148738/mta-records-highest-modern-one-day-subway-ridership