Subway ridership just keeps on rising. The MTA has dropped a bucket of ridership data on us this morning and it's a present to stats geeks and subway nerds. We're still sorting through all of it but the big takeaway is this: Subway ridership grew 2.26 percent, to 1,640,434,672 riders. That is the most straphangers since 1950!
The busiest stations, meanwhile, are pretty much as expected. Times Square, with 60,604,822 riders last year, comes out on top followed by Grand Central (42,795,505), Herald Square (37,731,386), Union Square (34,927,178) and the two Penn Station stops (26,758,623 for the 1/2/3 stop and 24,751,771 for the A/C/E stop).
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, what stations are busiest changes depending on the day of the week. Though Times Square is tops all around, Union Square jumps to second place on the weekends when it sees an average 61,699 riders.
And there are some interesting borough-by-borough stats changes! While 161 St-Yankee Stadium is the tops in the Bronx every day of the week, Jay St. MetroTech gets usurped by the Atlantic Avenue on the weekends, and Flushing-Main Street in Queens gets taken down a peg by 74-Broadway/Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue.
For another example of how the weekend changes things, the Bedford Avenue L stop on the weekdays is the 46th most used station in the system and the fifth most used in Brooklyn. But on the weekends, when it works, it fills out its skinny jeans and becomes the 22nd most used station in the system and the number two stop in the borough. In 2011 it had 7,738,863 riders (up from 7,418,203 in 2010)!
Seriously, there is a ton of information to go through—we've got a lot more data and graphs over here. But if you want to play along, you can dive in yourself below. Tell us what you notice in the comments!
