LOWER MANHATTAN — Here's something you likely already noticed as a daily commuter in Lower Manhattan: subway ridership below Canal Street jumped in 2015.
According to the MTA, weekday subway straphanger numbers increased 4 percent — an upswing officials attribute to the continued influx of tech, media and advertising companies in Downtown Manhattan.
In 2015, ridership as the Fulton Center jumped 7.5 percent, from 69,444 weekday commuters in 2014 to 74,676 in 2015 — making it the eighth busiest station in the city in 2015.
With repairs finally complete to the R train tunnel that links Manhattan to Brooklyn, the number of riders on the R train in Lower Manhattan stations soared — including a 25.2 percent increase at Whitehall Street/South Ferry, a 49.2 percent jump at Rector Street, a 58.5 percent boom at Cortlandt Street and a 45.3 upturn at City Hall.
The Lower Manhattan straphanger upswing follows in step with the rest of New York — subway ridership jumped 0.6 percent from the previous year, with ridership the highest it has been since 1948, the MTA said. More than 1.76 billion commuters rode the subway in 2015.
