Ridership On Nation’s Subways Still Down By Half

The Hill reports:

This week, New York subway officials grabbed a woman passing the turnstiles at the 161st St.-Yankee Stadium station and announced she had won a prize for being their billionth passenger of 2022. That sounds like a lot of passengers, until you consider that the New York City Subway carried 1.7 billion riders in pre-pandemic 2019.

The nation’s second- and third-busiest subway systems, in Chicago and Washington, D.C., are faring even worse. Fall ridership is running at about half of 2019 numbers on Chicago’s “L,” which logged 87 million passengers through October. Washington’s Metro carried roughly 225,000 daily passengers through October, two-fifths of its 2019 ridership.

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The pandemic is fading. When will subway riders return? https://t.co/dYxSBfxSEP

— Daniel de Visé (@danieldevise) January 2, 2023