Mass transit is seeing its highest ridership of the pandemic era on the same week that students are returning to the nation’s largest public school system, and most city employees are mandated to go back to the office.
On Tuesday, 2.96 million straphangers rode the subway, and 1.3 million riders boarded buses. The commuter railroads have also been setting pandemic records. Metro-North broke its single-day ridership record on Monday with 122,000 commuters, and the Long Island Railroad hit 151,000 last Friday.
Despite these new high water marks for ridership, the numbers are still only about half of what they were before the pandemic. NJ Transit’s ridership also remains at about 50% of pre-pandemic levels.
“Ridership is moving and it’s indicative of the fact that people are coming back to normal life and they’re trusting in the MTA,” said interim Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber at Wednesday’s MTA board meeting.
The MTA is scheduling the same number of subway and bus trips as it did before the pandemic, but it has been unable to deliver fully on those schedules, mostly due to crew shortages. About 10% of subway trips and 6.5% of bus trips were cancelled last month, resulting in longer wait times for riders.
The MTA announced this week that a new class of subway conductors graduated, and it’s expected to help fill in those missing subway shifts.
“Due to the hiring freeze that began during the earlier phases of the pandemic, we’ve experienced challenges when it comes to staffing train crews,” said New York City Transit Senior Vice President of Subways Demetrius Crichlow in a statement. “[It] marks the start of a turn back toward more regular service as more New Yorkers continue to return to the system.”
Unlike mass transit, the MTA’s bridges and tunnels are seeing a return to pre-pandemic levels. In July, the latest month for which data is available, about 28 million vehicles crossed the MTA’s bridges and tunnels, compared to 23.3 million in 2020. July was the fifth month in a row of increased vehicular traffic through the tolls.
In an effort to get more riders back on the subways and buses, the MTA announced a goal at Wednesday’s board meeting to double the number of people enrolled in the Fair Fares program through an advertising campaign.
The half-price MetroCard program is available to low income New Yorkers living at or below the federal poverty level. It’s run by the city, not the MTA, and has 241,910 people enrolled.
“[Fair Fares] helps the entire city: restaurant workers, hospitality industry, the other front line workers who are essential to everyone else,” said David Jones, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Community Service Society of New York, which launched the program. Jones is also an MTA board member, who said the city needs to, “get working people who can’t work remotely to participate.”
Jones said he’s confident that even if the city doubles the number of participants in Fair Fares, the city’s allocated budget for the program, $53 million, will be enough to meet the demand.
MTA leaders said that the more people who ride mass transit, the faster the city will recover; and the faster the city recovers, the faster the MTA will get back to pre-pandemic ridership levels. Officials said this is the only way to avoid future fare hikes and service cuts.
The MTA has committed to no fare hikes in 2021. But even with billions of dollars in federal relief aid, the MTA is still projecting a more than $2 billion deficit by 2025.
