Metro-North: Rail riders set record in 2008

Ken Valenti
The Journal News

Passengers rode Metro-North Railroad at record levels last year, some of them pushed onto trains by gas costing $4 a gallon, though the monthly increases evaporated by the end of the year as gas prices came down and the sinking economy took away many people's jobs.

Metro-North reported 2008 ridership of 84.2 million, a showing that not only broke the record set the year before, when about 81 million rides were given, but exceeded that year in every month except December, when the number of monthly riders dipped by a little less than a percentage point.

"We are seeing the effects of the economic slowdown," railroad spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said. "And we're going to fight to hold onto everybody we can."

The railroad projects that ridership will continue to rise this year, despite the region's economic woes.

Passengers took from 6.1 million to 7.3 million rides each month on the Hudson, Harlem and New Haven lines, which make up the crux of the Metro-North service. Those three "east of Hudson" branches accounted for 81.5 million rides last year. Passengers on the "west of Hudson" Pascack Valley and Port Jervis lines accounted for another 2.1 million. The total also includes the 666,000 rides given on the two cross-Hudson ferries and the "Hudson Rail Link" bus service in the Bronx, all of which feed into the train system.

Several passengers said they noticed more people on the trains as the ridership has grown.

"By White Plains it's standing room only," Southeast resident John Taylor said last week, riding a Harlem Line train from Brewster to Grand Central Terminal with his wife, Vivian. When they got on, the train was mostly empty, having started its run one stop earlier in Southeast.

Stephen Dee, 47, a general contractor buying his morning coffee Friday at Cafe La Track, the coffee shop at the Chappaqua train station, said he often gets the four-seat double bench to himself on the train, but notices that rush-hour trains home are more crowded.

"I think people aren't staying in the city that extra hour having dinner," he said.

When each month is compared with the same month in 2007, ridership was up 4 to 6 percent much of the year. In February and July, passengers took 6.2 percent more rides than in the same months the previous year.

That coincided with soaring gasoline prices. The state saw its highest average price for a gallon of regular gas - a hair under $4.31 - on July 9, according to daily surveys by AAA. Starting in August, Metro-North ridership still showed gains, but they shrank steadily through November, when ridership rose just 1 percent over November 2007. The 6,989,977 rides given in December were down 0.9 percent from the year before.

The slowdown and eventual decline came as the region, and the country as a whole, was struck by rising unemployment. In December, unemployment statewide reached 7 percent, its highest rate since June 1994, according to the state Department of Labor.

Also during that time, people drove their cars less often, even as gas prices dropped drastically. By mid-December, gas prices in New York were more than a dollar less than the year before.

Traffic at the Yonkers toll along Interstate 87, for instance, was down 11.1 percent in November, according to the New York Thruway Authority. Fewer cars and trucks also were passing through the Tappan Zee Bridge tolls and the Interstate 95 toll in New Rochelle, authority figures show.

On the Henry Hudson Bridge, a link for Bronx and Westchester residents to reach Manhattan, 5.7 million tolls were paid in the last three months of 2008, according to the Bridges and Tunnels division of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. That was down 7.35 percent from the same period in 2007, when 6.1 million tolls were paid, the numbers show.

Robert Sinclair, spokesman for AAA New York, said the roads are less crowded not only because more people are out of work, but because the economy in general is causing people to drive less.

"With gas prices as low as they were, it can't help be anything but the economy," he said.

The Thruway Authority data match other indicators he's seen, including a drop in the number of requests his organization is getting for roadmaps used on driving vacations.

On Metro-North, Michael Druce, 60, of Brookfield, Conn., who rides the Harlem Line train to Manhattan about twice a week, said he noticed a few more empty seats in recent weeks.

But with ridership still high, many passengers said they haven't seen a drop. Indeed, the 7.3 million who rode in October was the highest monthly ridership in either last year or 2007, though it was only 2.7 percent higher than in the previous October.

Chris Noack, 35, who gets on in Purdys, said on a recent ride that the train really starts to fill around Chappaqua.

"That's usually when the middle seats start to fill up," said the Danbury, Conn., resident, who takes the train to Grand Central Terminal to reach his job at Microsoft. By Bedford Hills, people were sharing seats, and by Mount Kisco, boarding passengers had to walk up the aisles a bit to find an empty seat. At Chappaqua, sure enough, many of the middle seats filled up.

Jon Birenbaum, a legal recruiter in Manhattan, was one of several passengers standing near the doors.

"I'm a front-car guy, so I stand a lot," said Birenbaum, a strong believer in mass transit. He, too, noticed more people on the train, saying: "With the economy and the layoffs and stuff, you'd expect it to be less crowded, but it isn't."