Results tagged “ridership”

Absolutely zero surprise here: WMATA says the Metrorail system recorded high ridership on both Saturday and Sunday. If anything, we would have thought it might have been a little higher. This weekend marked the third highest Saturday and fourth highest Sunday ridership days in the history of Metro. Riders took 713,148 trips on Saturday and 469,751 trips on Sunday, both figures that are well over 200,000 higher than the same days last year. We always enjoy WMATA's press shop's inclusion with these announcements of the events going on when previous records were set. Sunday ridership records are obvious: the highest was the weekend of President Obama's Inauguration, and second and third are both Fourth of July related. But the Saturday records are more surprising: the top spot still belongs to the 1991 Desert Storm victory rally, and the second the 1997 Promise Keepers march.

In case we haven't been doing a good enough job drilling it into your head, public transportation has become increasingly popular in the D.C. metro area since gas prices have been going through the roof. Today, WMATA announced that Friday, July 11 saw the Metrorail system hit a brand new all-time record high for ridership, surpassing even that of the day of Ronald Reagan's funeral in 2004. What contributed to the 854,638 passengers who rode Metro on Friday? There was a Nationals game, and there was a large convention in town. But there are Nationals games all the time, and there are large conventions in town near every weekend. The message of this news shouldn't be that unusual circumstances led to a new record; it should be that this was more or less a regular summer day, and Metro smashed its old record.

It's becoming so commonplace for us to receive press releases about how Metro has recorded yet another record ridership day, we're in danger of starting to think these figures aren't that significant -- but that would be a big mistake. Dr. Gridlock noted on Monday that since April alone, nine dates had made their way into Metro's top dozen for ridership, which included last Friday. Now, make that ten.

Hundreds of thousands of people helped Metro set the transit agency’s third highest ridership day in the history of the 32-year-old rail system on Tuesday, June 24. Riders took 831,464 trips, which were 48,534 more trips than the same comparable day last year.

There were home games for the Nationals and the Mystics on Tuesday that contributed to the number, but there were also three top ridership days in the last week that had no special events. It's pretty obvious skyrocketing gas prices are changing people's commuting habits in the D.C. metro area.

Where have you gone, Louie Gohmert? Way back, you said that "Washington, D.C. is also the only city in the entire country that every senator and every member of Congress has a vested interest in seeing that it works properly, that water works, sewer works, and no other city in America has that."