The Battery’s Still Down, But Fewer People Ride in a Hole in the Ground
Almost two years after the official end of the Covid pandemic (in May 2023), ridership at the 17 subway stations in Lower Manhattan remains 32 percent below pre-pandemic levels, according to an analysis from State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli. For the purposes of this tabulation, Lower Manhattan is defined within the boundaries of Community District 1 (bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge). Ridership data is current through January of this year.
While subway ridership for the City as a whole has recovered to 72.7 percent of pre-pandemic levels, only four local stations have surpassed this benchmark. Two of these are major transit hubs: the Canal Street stop that serves J, N, Q, R, Z, 6, and W lines, with 74.5 percent of prior usage, and the Fulton Transit Center, serving the 2, 3, 4, 5, A, C, J, and Z trains, which has bounced back to 79.2 percent of pre-crisis levels.
The other two Lower Manhattan subway stations that have seen the strongest recoveries are local stops that serve only the 1 train: Franklin Street (with 81.5 percent of earlier ridership) and World Trade Center/Cortland Street (89.7 percent of ridership before March 2020). If these four outliers are removed, Lower Manhattan subway ridership drops to 64.4 percent of its historical levels. The most halting Downtown recovery was documented at the Bowling Green stop on the 4 and 5 lines, which saw 57.7 percent of pre-pandemic ridership at the start of this year.
By contrast, the ten stations citywide with the highest rates of recovery, mostly located in Brooklyn and Queens, have all surpassed 100 percent of pre-pandemic usage rates.
Mr. DiNapoli offers a possible explanation for Lower Manhattan’s laggardly performance, noting that during the pandemic, “residents of higher-income neighborhoods were more likely to be employed in sectors that were more easily adaptable to remote work models, such as financial activities or business services. Ridership in these neighborhoods – and particularly at the major hubs in the City’s Central Business District – is also more dependent upon business, tourism, and commuters.”
Because this data does not fully reflect changes in commuting patterns that may have been spurred by the onset of congestion pricing, which began on January 5, it remains unclear whether the program (which aims to deter driving in Manhattan south of 60th Street, by imposing a toll) may have boosted local subway usage.