Subway and bus ridership for 2021

In 2021, subway and bus ridership continued its recovery from the unprecedented low ridership of 2020 resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the year, restrictions on businesses and travels were gradually lifted; schools reopened in September for in-person learning and workers returned to the office in a gradual manner.

In 2021, our total subway ridership was 760 million, reaching 45% of our 2019 ridership numbers. Total bus ridership was 312 million, back to 56% of our 2019 ridership numbers.

We operate the largest public transportation agency in North America and one of the largest in the world. The New York City subway has a daily ridership of approximately 2.4 million, and our bus system has a daily ridership of 1.2 million. This represents only 45% and 56%, respectively, of our pre-pandemic ridership levels.

Our system includes:

• More than 6,455 subway cars, which collectively traveled about 331 million miles in 2021
• 472 subway stations
• 665 miles of track
• 5,780 vehicles in our bus fleet, all of which are 100% accessible to riders with disabilities
• 234 local bus routes, 20 Select Bus Service routes, and 73 express bus routes in the five boroughs

We have 472 stations, the largest number of public transit subway stations of any system in the world. Note that our table lists 424 stations. We combined ridership data for station complexes, where stations are connected by transfer passageways. (We can't accurately allocate ridership to each station in a complex.) For example, the 14 St A, C, E station is combined with the 8 Av L station.

The station names and lines stopping at each station reflect service at the end of 2021.

In our spreadsheet, stations are listed alphabetically by borough, and the rankings are by 2021 ridership. The “systemwide adjustment” accounts for miscellaneous ridership and other adjustments that are not allocated by station.

In our tables, stations that were temporarily closed (either fully or partially) are denoted with asterisks; go to the “Closures” tab for the closure dates. For these stations, zero ridership was included in the averages for any days when the station was closed, except for the days when the entire subway was closed or fare-free.

Local routes begin with one or two letters corresponding to the major borough of operation (B=Brooklyn, Bx=Bronx, M=Manhattan, Q=Queens, S=Staten Island). New York City Transit express routes begin with the letter “X”, except for “SIM” used for express routes established under the Staten Island Express Bus Network Redesign.

MTA Bus express routes begin with “BM” for Brooklyn to Manhattan routes, “BxM” for Bronx to Manhattan routes, and “QM” for Queens to Manhattan routes. In the ridership averages, zero was included for any day during the year on which a given route did not operate, except for the days when the entire bus system was closed or fare-free. In the following tables, certain routes that effectively operate as a single route are combined.

Download our data for New York City Transit and MTA Bus Company.