![\"new](\"https:\/\/www.livabl.com\/articles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/new-york-city-subway-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nPhoto: LWYang\/Flickr<\/a><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n New York City Subway ridership peaked in the 1940s before taking a big hit between the late 1970s and early 1990s. But the system\u2019s glory days may not be behind it for long \u2014 new ridership records could be set in the coming years.<\/span><\/p>\n Those are just a couple of the interesting points revealed earlier this month in a <\/span>New Geography article<\/span><\/a> by Wendell Cox, principal of Demographia. The post lays out a variety of statistics on transit use in New York City, focusing in particular on how the city stacks up when compared to other American cities. <\/span><\/p>\n One key takeaway is the city\u2019s \u201cutter dominance of the well-publicized national transit ridership increases of the last decade.\u201d As Cox points out, between 2005 and 2015, New York City Subway ridership rose by almost 1 billion trips, while ridership of all US transit services excluding the New York City Subway decreased by nearly 200 million trips. <\/span><\/p>\n In other words, the New York City Subway was single-handedly responsible for the rise in overall transit use in the US from 2005 to 2015. It was also largely responsible for the <\/span>record 10.8 billion trips<\/span><\/a> on public transit that Americans took in 2014.<\/span><\/p>\n Chart: <\/span><\/i>New Geography<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n Providing more perspective on those figures, Cox notes that the New York City Subway has nearly 2.5 times the annual ridership of the other nine largest metro systems in the US combined. What\u2019s more, its ridership is about 10 times that of the Washington Metro and the Chicago \u201cL,\u201d and more than 50 times that of the Los Angeles Metro.<\/p>\n Issues with the transit systems in other cities are partially to blame for the New York City Subway\u2019s impressive performance. For example, safety concerns have caused problems for the Washington Metro; however, that\u2019s not the case in every city \u2014 the Los Angeles Metro has lost ridership even with an \u201caggressive rail program.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n