From Kieran Healy a comparison of NYC transit to every commercial airport in the country:
His explanation is worth a read: here. And the raw data is here.
What does it mean?
The lines trend upwards as travel slowly returned to normal after the 2020-2021 disruption from Covid. Obviously hybrid work has an effect on local transit but it probably does not on flying. Recent daily maximums have been in the range of 4.3 million people (more than Healy’s graph shows because the weekly average is always going to be less than the daily maximum), down from the pre-Covid peak of around 5.7 million. It’s my impression that the rush hours have also become less intense and more spread out, as people have more flexibility about their commutes than in the past.
Adding the subway and city busses together gets you to about 5 million trips per day, weekly average; adding in the commuter railroads gets up close to 5.5 million. Putting that in context, 10 of the 27 countries in the European Union have populations smaller than 5.5 million. Or, coming at it from another angle, the population of Manhattan roughly doubles from commuters during the work day, as about two million people enter and then leave.
Top image by Mitchell Trotter on Unsplash.
