If you went to a Nats game this season, and traveled there by Metro, this probably shouldn’t be a huge surprise: an average of about one-third of fans at each game used Metro to get to Nats Park.
PlanItMetro, Metrorail’s planning blog, released data today about the number of fans who took the train to Nats games during the 2014 season. The data isn’t terribly surprising; anyone who’s taken the train to a Nats game knows how crowded they get, especially trying to get home. But there’s still some interesting data pulled that gives a snapshot of Nats fans’ commuting habits to home games.
According to their data, over the 81 home games this season, about 890,000 total riders took the train to the ballpark. With an average attendance of 31,000 people per game, this works out to about 11,000 riders per game, this equates to about a 34 percent mode share for Metro at Nats Park, including entries or exits. In terms of total trips, 1.7 million were taken on Metro to Nats park this season.
PlanItMetro also found that ridership to games is “typically eight percent higher than ridership from the game,” and that Friday games had the highest mode share (38 percent), and Wednesday games had the lowest (32 percent). Additionally, the data found that market share is usually stable (between 30 and 40 percent), even if attendance for a game was particularly high or low.
And as for games where Jayson Werth garden gnomes were given away? Well, you don’t need data to know how many people clogged the Metro for that.
Check out the data visualization below. And view more graphs here.