There’s still a long way to go for the nation’s busiest transit system to get back to pre-pandemic ridership levels, but New Yorkers crossed at least one symbolic threshold in 2022.
“The MTA announced Tuesday that subway ridership has passed the billion mark in 2022, the first time since before the COVID-19 pandemic,” reports Ben Brachfield.
The billionth rider on the system this year was greeted with fanfare—including a press conference with MTA officials, a new OMNY card pre-loaded with $100, a free membership to the Transit Museum, and a framed work of subway art, according to the article.
Brachfield provides more background on the relative significance of the benchmark:
Crossing the billion threshold is a major COVID-era landmark for the authority, which has struggled to return to its pre-pandemic ridership levels. Annual ridership between 2016 and 2019, the four years before the onset of COVID-19, averaged more than 1.7 billion, according to MTA statistics. But ridership plummeted to 639 million in 2020 as most New Yorkers were urged to quarantine at home, rising to just under 760 million in 2021.
See the Planetizen archive for more on the recent history of transit ridership in New York and elsewhere in the United States.
Read the full story: MTA surpasses 1 billion subway riders in 2022, a first in COVID era
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