{"id":3288,"date":"2023-01-03T07:19:37","date_gmt":"2023-01-03T13:19:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=3288"},"modified":"2023-03-15T03:05:26","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T08:05:26","slug":"as-pandemic-wanes-subway-cars-remain-half-empty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=3288","title":{"rendered":"<strong>As pandemic wanes, subway cars remain half-empty<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week, New York subway officials grabbed a woman passing the turnstiles at the 161st St.-Yankee Stadium station and announced she had won a prize for being their billionth passenger of 2022.<br \/>\nThat sounds like a lot of passengers, until you consider that the New York City Subway carried 1.7 billion riders in pre-pandemic 2019.<br \/>\nOrdinary life has returned to many urban restaurants, taverns and sidewalks, especially on evenings and weekends. But the nation\u2019s great subways have not fully rebounded from the ghost-train dystopia of COVID-19.<br \/>\nRidership in 2020 plunged 60 percent, to 640 million, on the nation\u2019s busiest subway system, the smallest number to ride New York subways\u00a0in more than a century. In other words, between 2019 and 2020, New York\u2019s Metropolitan Transportation Authority lost a billion passengers. Most of them haven\u2019t returned.<br \/>\nThe nation\u2019s second- and third-busiest subway systems, in Chicago and Washington, D.C., are faring even worse.<br \/>\nFall ridership is running at about half of 2019 numbers on Chicago\u2019s \u201cL,\u201d which logged 87 million passengers through October. Washington\u2019s Metro carried roughly 225,000 daily passengers through October, two-fifths of its 2019 ridership.<br \/>\nThe obvious reason for half-empty subways is remote work. The share of\u00a0people working primarily from home tripled\u00a0from 6 percent in 2019 to 18 percent in 2021, according to Census data.<br \/>\nVirtual workers abound in big cities. Nearly half of D.C. workers now toil mostly at home.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehill.com\/policy\/transportation\/3793566-as-pandemic-wanes-subway-cars-remain-half-empty\/\">Thehill<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week, New York subway officials grabbed a woman passing the turnstiles at the 161st St.-Yankee Stadium station and announced she had won a prize for being their billionth passenger of 2022. That sounds like a lot of passengers, until you consider that the New York City Subway carried 1.7 billion riders in pre-pandemic 2019. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3289,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3426,2883,1760,3427,1847,3425],"class_list":["post-3288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-carriages","tag-covid-19","tag-pandemic","tag-ridership","tag-subway","tag-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3288"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7602,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3288\/revisions\/7602"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}