It’s not your imagination — the subway is getting more intimate.
More riders packed onto subway trains on one day in October this year than any other since the MTA started keeping daily records– shattering the previous sardine-can record from last year by more than 50,000 passengers, data shows.
More than 6.2 million people rode the mobbed subway on Oct. 29, the last Thursday of that month. It is the equivalent of more than 50 crowded subway trains over the MTA’s previous record of 6,167,165 riders.
New York City Transit began keeping daily ridership records in 1985, but officials believe subway ridership was the highest in New York City history in the late 1940s.
“The relentless growth in subway ridership shows how this century-old network is critical to New York’s future,” said MTA chairman Thomas Prendergast in a statement.
The average weekday subway ridership in October was 5.97 million people, the highest in more than four decades. Weekend ridership that month was also sky-high, according to the MTA.
On Halloween, a Saturday, more than 3.7 million people took to the subway to go to the parade in the Village and a Mets World Series game.
The greatest ridership spikes have been in northern Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Bushwick, which has seen an increase of almost 15,000 passengers a day. Lower Manhattan below the Chambers Street stop has also seen more than 12,000 new straphangers daily this year.
The subway system added almost 450,000 riders between 2010 and 2014, the equivalent of the entire city of Miami or Raleigh.
To cope with the cramped trains, the MTA recently added a new station on 34th Street and 11th Avenue, to serve new developments coming to the far west side of Manhattan.
The Second Avenue Subway will open next year, bringing three new stations to the Upper East Side. The line is expected to be used by 200,000 riders daily, and take pressure off the Lexington Avenue line.
