Big skid in ridership on rails, buses

New Yorkers are ditching subways and buses at an alarming rate, spelling trouble for the MTA and its efforts to fix its aging and outdated equipment, new agency data show.

It’s not that the transit system isn’t crowded — subway ridership remains near historic highs, about 60% above 30 years ago.

But it seems the number of people using buses and subways has peaked.

Daily weekday subway ridership was about 5.44 million in 2018. That was 143,000 fewer riders per day than in 2017 — a decline of about 2.6%.

Bus ridership is off too. On weekdays in 2018, about 1.81 million people rode local and express buses. That was 113,000 fewer riders per day than in 2017 — a drop of 5.9%.

The decline came even with a booming city economy, which saw the number of jobs grow by 1.6% last year.

Look at the year-over-year numbers, and the picture is even worse.

The MTA counted about 1.68 billion subway rides in all of 2018 — a drop of nearly 5% since 2015, when subway ridership hit an all-time high.

The three-year skid is the most significant drop in ridership for the system since the period between 1989 and 1991, when the subway lost nearly 8% of its riders.

And the decline between 2015 and 2018 is the largest for a three-year stretch since at least 1975, the earliest year for which annual ridership data are publicly available.

Annual bus ridership is also dropping quickly — the MTA’s latest data show 569 million bus rides were taken last year, a 5% drop from 2017 and a nearly 15% drop from 2012.

No one factor is to blame for the problem.

“Over the three years, it’s like there was a perfect storm of things that occurred,” said Chris Jones, chief planner at the Regional Plan Association.

The two biggest problems are worsening subway service and the rise of app-based for-hire cars, Jones said. Apps such as Uber and Lyft accounted for more than 691,000 car trips in the city each day in November, city Taxi and Limousine Commission data shows.

“Obviously it’s a significant hit,” Jones said of the declining ridership’s impact on the MTA’s finances. “Unlike most transit systems in the country, fares account for more than half the revenue in New York.”

New York is not alone with this problem — ridership fell in 31 of the 35 biggest metro areas in the U.S. between 2016 and 2017, according to a study by the TransitCenter advocacy group.