Subway and bus ridership for 2020

2020 began with the continuation of 2019's upward trends in subway and bus ridership from January to early March.  Afterwards, the coronavirus outbreak and the consequent "New York State on PAUSE" executive order to close all non-essential business sent both subway and bus ridership to the unprecedented lowest point in April, when subway was at 8% of 2019 ridership and bus at 23%. Through several reopening phrases, subway ridership slowly recovered to 31% of 2019 ridership with bus at 50% by the end of Year 2020.

We operate the largest public transportation agency in North America and one of the largest in the world. In 2020, the subway has daily ridership of approximately 2 million and an annual ridership of roughly 640 million.

Our system includes:

• More than 6,400 subway cars, which collectively traveled about 325 million miles in 2020
• 472 subway stations
• 665 miles of track
• 5,784 vehicles in our bus fleet, all 100% accessible to riders with disabilities
• 234 local bus routes, 20 Select Bus Service routes, and 73 express routes in the five boroughs
   

Average weekday, Saturday, and Sunday ridership includes every weekday, Saturday, and Sunday in the year, except major holidays and days when the subway system was closed or operated fare-free.

Average weekend ridership is the two-day sum of average Saturday plus average Sunday ridership. Ridership on major holidays (New Year's Day, Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas) is included only in the annual total.
 

We have 472 stations, the largest number of public transit subway stations of any system in the world. Note that our table lists 424 stations. We combined ridership data for station complexes, where stations are connected by transfer passageways. (We can't accurately allocate ridership to each station in a complex.) For example, the 14 St A, C, E station is combined with the 8 Av L station.

The station names and lines stopping at each station reflect service at the end of 2020.

In our spreadsheet, stations are listed alphabetically by borough, and the rankings are by 2020 ridership. The "systemwide adjustment" accounts for miscellaneous ridership and other adjustments that are not allocated by station.

In our tables, stations that were temporarily closed (either fully or partially) are denoted with asterisks; go to the "Closures" tab for the closure dates. For these stations, zero ridership was included in the averages for any days when the station was closed, except for the days when the entire subway was closed or fare-free.

Download our subway ridership data



 

Local routes begin with one or two letters corresponding to the major borough of operation (B=Brooklyn, Bx=Bronx, M=Manhattan, Q=Queens, S=Staten Island). New York City Transit express routes begin with the letter "X", except for "SIM" used for express routes established under the Staten Island Express Bus Network Redesign.

MTA Bus express routes begin with "BM" for Brooklyn to Manhattan routes, "BxM" for Bronx to Manhattan routes, and "QM" for Queens to Manhattan routes. In the ridership averages, zero was included for any day during the year on which a given route did not operate, except for the days when the entire bus system was closed or fare-free. In the following tables, certain routes that effectively operate as a single route are combined.