Very quietly last month, the MTA released their 2019 ridership tallies, and last year was a good year for the subways. After three years of declining ridership, annual subway ridership hit 1,697,787,002, a jump of nearly 18 million or a hair over 1 percent above 2018’s total. Usually, the MTA would celebrate increased ridership and increased fare revenue, but with things being as they are right now, the release of these numbers was a muted one.

Ultimately, the L train work that reduced weekend service frequency along the 14th St. corridor likely cost the MTA a shot at 1.7 billion passengers, and if fare evasion was really as prevalent as the MTA has tried to claim it is, the subways last year may have been more crowded than they’ve ever been. I’m not quite sure that passes the smell test, but I digress. All in, 2019 was a positive step forward for the MTA, a rare spot of good news amidst the onslaught of bad these days. Whether the city will ever get back to these lofty subway ridership numbers in the COVID Era depends upon more than just the development of a vaccine.

2019 In Review

As subway ridership has cratered amidst the coronavirus pandemic, it feels weird to talk about crowded trains and increased ridership, but let’s take a look at the numbers. The gains were fairly evenly split between weekdays and weekends, a positive sign for Saturday and Sunday service which had been bleeding riders for years. An average 2019 weekday saw near 5.494 million riders, up from 5.438 million in 2018 while combined weekend ridership was slightly above 5.494 million, up also from 5.438 million a year before. Saturday gains outpaced Sunday with an average Saturday witnessing an increase of 40,000 riders while Sundays saw an increase of just 14,500 riders.

Outside of the way the L train rejiggered ridership across the G, J and M trains, the city’s newest subway stations saw some of the largest gains. The 7 train’s terminal at 34th St. and 11th Ave. saw ridership jump by 75% to 18,875 per day as the Hudson Yards development took shape and the Vessel and mall opened. Total weekday entrances at the three Q stops along Second Ave. increased by around 2500 per day as well, gains that outpaced the overall jump in subway ridership by a few percentage points.

The L train work, meanwhile, cut into the MTA’s push for 1.7 billion riders, but declines weren’t quite as steep as I would have expected. Average weekend ridership for the L train stations at 1st and 3rd Avenues in Manhattan declined by approximately 50% while stops through Williamsburg and Bushwick saw declines between 40-50 percent. Straphanger traffic into Bedford Ave. dipped by only 36 percent, and it was still the 39th busiest weekend stop last year, an impressive showing considering the paltry headways. Meanwhile, the Lorimer/Metropolitan L/G station saw a decline of only 3.7 percent, and G train stops in South Williamsburg and Greenpoint saw increases in weekend ridership of around 25 percent.

Other lines expected to carry the L train’s slack did indeed do so. Nearby station along the J and M lines saw weekend demand in excess of 50% above 2018 levels, and all in, the various mitigation efforts worked. Overall, the subways lost around 20,000 weekend entrances due to the L work, but nearby lines certainly saw an uptick in usage. (The L train worked formally wrapped in late April, and I wrote a postmortem on the L train project.)

2020 In Preview: A Spike Before the Cliff of the Pandemic

After this rosy 2019, things were looking up to start the current year as well. As the MTA reported in its board materials and on the release trumpeting last year’s ridership, “This upward trend in ridership continued in January and February of 2020, with both months outpacing January and February in 2019.” But nature in the form of COVID-19 is having its way with the world right now, and as shelter-in-place orders have slowed down the pace of life in New York City, only around 400,000-500,000 riders per day are using the subways, a 90% drop in ridership hard to contexualize. In a letter released last month calling for an additional $3.9 billion in federal aid, the MTA included a report prepared by consultants at McKinsey & Company detailing expected ridership levels over the remainder of 2020. The chart is an ugly one:

The MTA has yet to release an updated version of this chart, and already, even these pessimistic assumptions look too optimistic. The New York City area isn’t likely to see a loosening of the state’s PAUSE restrictions until early June, and the “delayed containment and recovery” track where ridership reaches 40 percent feels far more likely than the trend line anticipating 60% of riders returning by September. Whether we’ll be back at 5-10 percent of ridership and in another lockdown situation by the end of the year will depend upon a second wave. Even without another wave, the MTA is looking at a lost year of ridership, and even if everything breaks right for the city, the optimistic trend line contemplates only around 55% of riders will return this year. What if, as The Times speculates today, few people go back to work? While I am skeptical of the long-term trend, in the short term, Manhattan offices are going to be empty, and the days of 1.7 billion annual riders are going to be nothing but fond memories for the foreseeable future.

The question lingering over all of this involves the future. What happens next? Even the McKinsey analysis punts on that question as projections include a wide range of options and end in December. Subway ridership isn’t going to come back on January 1, 2021, and after receiving $3.8 billion last month and asking for an additional $3.9 billion, the MTA now says it will need at least $10.4 billion by the end of 2021 to stay afloat. Forget the $51 billion capital plan and the long-desired federal contribution; the MTA needs these dollars to stay solvent during a prolonged period of low ridership. Without it, they – and the city – are sunk as the bills pile up.

“Our request has garnered substantial bipartisan support as it did in the first round,” MTA CEO and Chairman Pat Foye said this week. “This is not a red or blue state issue; it’s a no brainer. The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the importance of public transportation, during the pandemic and as part of the economic recovery when the pandemic subsides.”

But the recovery isn’t just economic. The MTA has to make people feel that transit is a choice that will not jeopardize public health. Already, the agency has had to contend with spurious claims such as those put forth in an MIT report that the subways spread coronavirus. Both Alon Levy and Aaron Gordon burned plenty of pixels debunking and contextualizing the argument. I don’t buy it either, but while we learn more about the transmission of coronavirus via droplets spread in contained spaces without sufficient ventilation, the subways can seem daunting. That is, in part, why the Governor ordered the end of 24/7 subway service (though we should be skeptical of those claims as well, as I wrote in a Patreon post last week).

Still, making the subways appealing is going to be costly. The MTA will have to maintain the appearances of cleanliness, through an aggressive cleaning and disinfecting program currently underway. This program has no price tag yet, and the agency hasn’t released any sort of scientific assessment indicating how long trains stay clean or disinfected after customers board to touch everything. We’ll have to get used to masks, gloves and a lot less singing on the subways. A contact-less fare payment should help too, but the OMNY rollout is still on pause due to the response to the virus. Until there is a vaccine, most New Yorkers are likely to view transit with skepticism, and I can’t say I blame them. The geometry of cars and the geography of New York City will likely help avoid the carmageddon we fear, but the MTA’s rider-dependent finances won’t improve unless and until ridership climbs and ridership won’t climb if New Yorkers aren’t comfortable on crowded subway trains.

Glimmers Of Hope Down The Line

Left unsaid in my ramblings today about the ridership figures is the impact of New York City’s most popular British import. The 2019 and early 2020 numbers were a testament to Andy Byford and the results he produced. By focusing on improving subway service and by focusing the public conversation on the actual improvements, riders returned to the system. The one percent increase during a prolonged period of L train service diversions is a true success story, and the building blocks are in place for the MTA to build on that success in a post-COVID Era. The problem will be one of revenue, from the feds who can rescue the MTA and save the economic lifeline of the city as the riders start to trickle back, and one of time. A year from now, when the MTA releases the 2020 ridership numbers, the picture will be grim, but we can hope now that things go up from there.

The MTA’s latest digital ad campaigns honors workers who have been on the front lines of COVID-19 pandemic.

Monday marked the one-month anniversary since my last subway, and it’s been a strange, surreal 33 days since I last took the 4 train from Manhattan to Brooklyn after one final day in the office before I fully embraced my firm’s “work from home” policy. Nothing in particular jumps out about that subway ride. The 4 leaving Grand Central was slightly emptier than normal, and straphangers seemed a bit jumpier than usual. But it was nothing compared with the last bus ride I took two days later, and little did we know what the next month would bring.

The bus ride, for what it’s worth, was much worse. Since my wife and I had to move at the start of a pandemic, I had to take a last-minute trip to Home Depot on Sunday night, and I couldn’t fit the large roll of bubble wrap in a Citi Bike basket for the trip back home. So my last transit trip of 2020 was a B44-SBS on Sunday, March 15. A guy with visibly red eyes and sniffles boarded at Fulton St., and everyone on the bus skirted out of his way while we all collectively visibly flinched.

At around 9:05 p.m., I got off that bus at Nostrand Ave and St. Johns and haven’t taken a transit ride since then. I’m not an essential worker, and now isn’t the time for subway joy rides. I’ve spotted the Franklin Ave. Shuttle a few times, running without many riders. I’ve heard the IRT locals travel between Grand Army Plaza and Eastern Parkway during my late-night runs through Prospect Park. I’ve seen buses, sometimes empty and sometimes not, continuing to criss-cross the streets of Brooklyn, those blue and yellow lumbering vehicles the unsung workhorses of our transit infrastructure.

It’s profoundly weird, this feeling of disconnect from transit, a part of everyday life in New York City, as it feels to be disconnected from every other part of New York City life. I hear more ambulances than airplanes, even though my new place lines up with one of the approaches to Laguardia, more 7 p.m. applause than traffic. Only when I’m out of the city do I go weeks between subway rides, and I can confidently say I’ve never gone this long in my life without a transit ride. Even when I had a broken bone in my foot a few years ago, I had to hobble to the subway to get to a few doctors appointments. These days, most New Yorkers hardly go anywhere, and the subway feels more like a concept than the lifeblood of the city it was just a few weeks ago.

But the trains must go. In a city of 8 million, hundreds of thousands of people still need the trains to get to their essential jobs everyday, and even during a pandemic, around 500,000 people per day are relying on the MTA to get them to their patients, to their shifts at the post office, to their jobs maintaining the city’s food supplies. These are the folks who are keeping the city going even as everything else has involuntarily ground to a halt, and the transit system is getting them there. It could not be more vital.

It hasn’t been an easy few weeks for our transit system since my last post, and the podcast I recorded with Nicole Gelinas feels like a lifetime ago. At the time, it was clear that the pandemic had shot a multi-billion-dollar hole in the MTA’s budget, and the agency was reeling financially from the hit.

But now the agency is more than reeling in very personal ways. As of Tuesday afternoon, 59 transit employees have died due to COVID-19. These are the front-line workers who move the city, and they have been constantly under attack by the coronavirus since Day One. Toward the end of March, the MTA instituted an “essential service” plan that basically matched up subway service with available crews. With so many MTA workers quarantined after exposure to the virus, the MTA simply couldn’t run full service. With with ridership down approximately 93-95 percent, per MTA Chair Pat Foye’s confirmation on Tuesday, the agency can’t save money cutting service immediately amidst a crisis, and they need to maintain service to adhere to social distancing guidelines. Still, gone for now is the B train and the C, the W and Z and the 42nd St. Shuttle. Even still, these workers have fallen ill.

The MTA hasn’t escaped criticism for these deaths. At the start of the pandemic, the MTA, taking its guidance from the CDC and federal officials, barred the use of face masks, and only recently did the agency finally lift this restriction. MTA officials have defended the early guidance to me and have pointed to the CDC’s words. It’s hard to argue with that; after all, the MTA isn’t known for being ahead of any curve, and the CDC is supposed to be the be-all and end-all of pandemic response in America. But a few weeks later, the words in a recent post on The LIRR Today ring true:

Another point of contention has been MTA’s sluggishness towards the use of face masks (by supplying masks to all employees and strongly recommending/requiring their use by riders on the system) as more became known about the communicability of this virus. After originally not providing or even prohibiting the use of mask by frontline workers, the MTA relented on March 27—weeks into the pandemic—announcing that they would begin distributing tens of thousands of masks to frontline workers. MTA officials have tried to lean significantly on the notion in recent days that CDC guidance did not shift towards recommending asymptomatic people wear masks until very recently, but that doesn’t really pass muster… CDC guidance is just that, guidance—and guidance from the federal government has to be reasonably applicable to the entire country, and doesn’t account that the effects and rate of spread in places like New York might be different than in places like Topeka. Granted, the MTA should [not] be left to determine public health policy all on its own, and state and local health departments should have been more up to speed on this—but the MTA probably should have realized that having a hundred or more people crammed into small metal boxes in an already hostile environment, and then having employees sit in those boxes and breathe the same air for hours a day presented a risk level that is a fair bit beyond the norm and taken stronger precautions. And it was also the MTA who conflated CDC guidance against asymptomatic people wearing masks and turned that into a prohibition on mask use for many frontline employees. The MTA is ultimately responsible to provide a safe workplace, by protecting the health and safety of its employees, in any circumstance.

The MTA this week agreed to a $500,000 family benefit for any transit worker who died due to COVID-19. It’s the right thing to do, and my sympathies go out to every family grieving a loved one these days.

A March 27th fire that started in car 6347 claimed the life of TO Garrett Goble. (Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)

These coronavirus deaths weren’t the only underground tragedies in recent weeks as a fire — suspected as arson — tore through a 2 train near 110th Street a few weeks ago. Seventeen riders were injured and a train operator who helped rescue his passengers succumbed to his injuries. The fire was one of the more horrific intentional subway crimes in recent years, and it added to the sense of chaos and helplessness and detachment that has enveloped New York City. (Garrett Goble was later commemorated in graffiti.)

The fires and the deaths and the detachment from the regular pace of city life seem par for the course these days, and we’re months away from any return to normalcy. The MTA, as Gelinas wrote this week, is going to need a massive infusion of cash to power the city as our rebound occurs, and I’ll have more thoughts on the fiscal edge the MTA is teetering upon shortly. It’s not easy to make sense of much that happens these days, and who knows when any of us who aren’t essential workers will next ride the subway again?

As this surreal week has slipped by and New York’s response to the COVID-19 threat evolves every few hours, a lot of people have asked me the same questions: Will the trains keep running? Is it safe to ride them? I thought it would be useful to summarize where we are right now.

Transit Is Not Shutting Down

Will the trains keep running? That’s the question I’ve been asked the most, and the answer is clear: Right now, there are no plans to stop running subways, buses or commuter rail services. Rumors circulated throughout the day on Thursday that a shutdown — in effect, a quarantine-in-place for the city — was to be implemented, but the MTA and governor’s office vehemently denied this rumor. My sources within the agency did as well. For now, everything is running, and transit is not shutting down.

Could the state order a transit shutdown?

This one is tougher. The answer is yes; we’ve seen Governor Cuomo halt subway service in the face of a serious blizzard forecast. But for now, the monitoring is simply following available guidance. In an appearance on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show on Thursday morning, interim New York City Transit President Sarah Feinberg explained that the MTA is watching the governmental response closely (and of course Gov. Cuomo could order implementation of the agency’s contingency planning). Ultimately, shutting down the transit system means cutting off health care providers from their jobs and patients from medical care so it’s not a decision the MTA and New York will ever make lightly.

“If the CDC or New York City Department of Health at some point tells us to completely change the way we’re operating the system, we will do that. We take our guidance from them,” Feinberg said. “But for now, we’re running a normal service. We have a lot of people who are using the service, obviously. We’ve seen ridership tick down a bit in the last week or so, but for now, a lot of people are using the system, and we will continue to execute on that.”

How is the MTA cleaning the system?

The MTA has upped its cleaning frequencies. Contact points in stations — Metrocard and ticket machines, benches, turnstiles, and handrails — are now being disinfected twice per day. All subways, commuter rail cars and buses are cleaned at terminals, and the entire rolling stock is disinfected every 72 hours. It’s a Herculean task that lays bare the deficiencies in the MTA’s pre-COVID-19 cleaning practices, and that brings me to the next question.

Is it safe to use public transit?

This isn’t an easy question, and there is no easy answer. As Aaron Gordon explored at the start of the outbreak in New York last week, most epidemiologists felt the subways were safe, but we’ve learned more about this novel coronavirus in the past few weeks. The underlying analysis is the same, but right now, to the extent possible, those who can should stay home. Those who have to travel should try to avoid rush hour crowds (though the crowds are getting smaller), and those who are at high risk should absolutely not be waiting on crowded platforms for crowded trains.

Otherwise, the advice is the same for the trains as it is for any other circumstance right now: Do what you feel is best for yourself and those with whom you’re in constant contact. Practice good hygiene and always wash your hands before touching anything else after you’ve ridden transit. Read on for more about the challenges to adding service and some statements from our political leaders that didn’t fill my with confidence last weekend.

What is happening to transit ridership?

It’s down and precipitously. Earlier in the week, the MTA had reported a “high single-digits” decline, but by Wednesday, the numbers showed a massive slowdown. Ridership on the subways was down nearly 19% vs. March 11, 2019, and the buses saw a dip of 15%. On Thursday morning, Metro-North and LIRR ridership was down 48% and 31% respectively from a comparable Thursday in March. Again, though, the MTA does not plan to curtail service in response to demand. At some point, all of this extra spending and huge dip in fare revenue will put extreme pressures on the MTA budget, but that is a bridge we will have to cross later once the pandemic has subsided. We may need to discuss an MTA bailout far earlier than anyone expected.

Could the MTA run more service to disperse crowds

This is a question I had considered earlier in the week before the city and state started implementing social distancing by fiat and transit ridership started to nose-dive. It’s an academic question at this point as nearly everyone expects transit ridership to decline steeply over the next few days and weeks.

I started thinking about this question last weekend when both Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio started telling people to avoid crowds. At press conference on Sunday, Cuomo said, “If citizens are taking mass transit, if you can move to a train car that is not as dense, if you see a packed train car, let it go by, wait for the next train, same with if you’re taking a bus. It’s the density to proximity that we’re trying to reduce.”

The mayor echoed the governor’s sentiments. “If you are traveling by subway and the train that comes up is all packed and you can possibly wait for the next train in the hopes it might be less packed,” Bill de Blasio said, “please do.”

At first, I didn’t really know what to make of these statements. At their roots, the advice — try to take trains when they aren’t as crowded — is sound, but practically, it’s foolish. Rush hour platforms would be as crowded as trains and thus just as likely to be hot spots for transmission and contagion. On Tuesday night, before the worst of the week settled in, Feinberg went on NY1 to add some much-needed context to these remarks. It’s not, she said, “not possible for everyone” to change their commuting patterns. “People have different schedules, she said. “The thing to know is.. avoid crowded trains when possible…So if you can telecommute, fantastic. If you can walk to work great. Now is a great time to do that. But most people can’t. Most people depend on the subways and the buses. We’re here to provide safe and efficient transportation for them.”

Feinberg’s point is the right one; most people can’t simply change their commuting patterns. Telling people to do something is far different than creating incentives for them to do so. And so, as I said, before many companies started enforcing work-from-home policies on Wednesday, this got me thinking about ways to mitigate crowds. Could the MTA extend service during rush hour? Could the agency create a longer period of peak-hour service frequency in an effort to spread out rush hour commutes and reduce crowding?

In an ideal world, the answer would be yes, but we live in a less-than-deal world with real-world constraints. While not every train line is at capacity, due to the availability of rolling stock, some key bottlenecks and crew availability, the MTA can’t add rush hour service. In the post-peak periods, adding service runs up against FRA requirements limiting the number of hours train operators can work and union regulations. As much as we would love to snap our fingers and add a few hours of frequent service after 10 a.m. or 7 p.m., it just isn’t that easy.

So to avoid crowding underground, we’ll have to again listen to the mayor. “If you have the option of walking to work or taking a bike to work,” he said, “please do.” That, of course, would be far easier and safer had the mayor shown a true commitment to building out a bike lane network or if the mayor had immediately ordered DOT to implement temporary bike priority lanes covering popular commuting routes. It took until Thursday night for the mayor to order city workers to stay at home or come in later, a move that should remove around 100,000 people from the subways at rush hour. This should have happened on Sunday, but better now than later.

Do you have anything to comfort us through this stressful time?

Absolutely. The Cardvaark is always here for you.