The city’s subway system last year clocked its highest ridership since Harry Truman was president, driven mostly by an influx of young people, officials said.
More than 1.654 billion subway trips were made in 2012, a 13.7 million increase over 2011 and the largest number of trips in 62 years, according to MTA statistics released yesterday.
That’s an 8 percent jump that came despite a three-day shutdown during Hurricane Sandy.
Weekend ridership was particularly high. It grew by 3 percent from 2011 to 2012, shattering the all-time-high weekend record set in 1946.
At the time, that record was set in large part because many New Yorkers were still working six days a week to help the country get back on its feet after World War II.
Today, officials credit the boom with large numbers of young people using mass transit.
“Recent trends, like the younger ‘millennial’ generation increasingly gravitating toward transit around the country, are building on older trends,” said MTA interim Executive Director Thomas Prendergast.
Riders under 30 are flocking to the subways because they are using the system during hours that were traditionally slow times, such as late nights and weekends, said Mitchell Moss, director of the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management.
“The entire subway system was built as a way to get people to work,” he said. “Now people are using it as a means of maintaining their social lives. The subways are jammed at midnight, because that’s when the clubs get going.”
He pointed to a recent NYU study that found the Bedford Avenue stop on the L train — the epicenter of hipster New York — is just as crowded at midnight as it is during the morning rush hour.
“The city is safer, so more people go out,” Moss said. “And people feel safe on these crowded trains.”
Several national surveys have shown that younger people — wary of high gas prices and the negative effects on the environment — are less likely to own a car, preferring to use mass transit instead.
And in New York, the Department of Motor Vehicles reported a sharp drop in the number of drivers ages 16 and 17, decreasing from 103,702 in 2009 to 87,721 in 2010.
Ridership also grew on nearly every facet of the region’s mass-transit network, with strong growth on Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road — further proof that New Yorkers are ditching their cars.
To accommodate the 1.1 percent boost in riders on Metro-North, the MTA yesterday announced it’s increasing service on the Harlem, Hudson and New Haven lines — including running trains every 30 minutes instead of hourly at most stations during off-peaks hours.
LIRR ridership grew by .9 percent, in large part due to a high number of passengers going to the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, officials warned that the subway system might need to shut down more than usual to do extra repair work because of damages incurred during Sandy.
The feds require the MTA to complete Sandy-related work that the government is funding within two years, which means the agency will have to rush to get the work done, Prendergast said.
That means that repairs will likely be scheduled during times that impact a majority of riders, he said.