Subway Ridership Hits All-Time High

by Nancy Garduño, age 16

Mass transportation is an important part of any big city. In most cases, citizens depend on local transit to get to work. In New York City, people are now using the subway system not only for work, but also to maintain their social lives. Consequently, two long-time records have been broke in “the City.”

Until now, the weekend had not been a prime time to ride the subway. According to Mitchell Moss, director of the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation, weekends, late evenings and early mornings have traditionally been slow times.

But recently, the trains are as crowded at midnight as they are during the morning rush hour. The younger Millennial Generation, flooding subway stations at unprecedented rates, has shattered the all-time-high weekend ridership record. It was last set in 1946, when World War II had just ended, and subway riders were putting in six-day work weeks to get the country running again.

Ridership in general hit new peaks in 2012, with more than 1,654 billion subway trips made, an eight percent jump from 2011 despite its closure during Hurricane Sandy. This is the largest number of trips in 62 years, according to the Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA) statistics.

Surprisingly enough, it’s the social lives of young people that have prompted these new subway records.

[Source: New York Post]









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