Subway Breaks One-Day Ridership Record With 6,217,621 Passengers
For reasons unknown, the third Thursday in October is traditionally one of the busiest days for the NYC subway. Last year, on October 30th, a record was set with 6,167,165 passengers, and now, the MTA has put out a press release announcing that this past October 29th, this record was smashed when 6,217,621 customers swiped their MetroCards. “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,” the agency reports.
The release continues:
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% 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.
Ridership surged on the weekends as well, with the average weekend ridership higher than any October in over 45 years. On Saturday, October 31, 2015, the day of the Village Halloween Parade and a Mets World Series game, 3,730,881 customers rode the subway – making it the fifth-busiest Saturday on recent record.
Additionally, ridership has spiked in northern Brooklyn, where legs of the A, C, G, J, M, Z, and L lines have seen an average of 14,733 more riders since this time last year. And to put all these figures in perspective: “Between 2010 and 2014, the subway system has added 440,638 daily customers, roughly the equivalent of the entire population of mid-sized cities like Miami, Fla. or Raleigh, N.C.”
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