Bad Weather and the Subway

Snow in Inwood, New York. Photograph by the author. Recently I’ve been looking at hourly ridership data from the New York City Subway. Last time we learned that people go to work in the morning and come home in the evening, for example. (All together now: “Only in New York, baby!”) Today we’ll learn that bad weather makes people stay at home. Except, sometimes it doesn’t. Here’s a graph of hourly ridership data for the subway system in 2025. You’ll recall that the subway system carries a lot of passengers every day. The ridership data overall represents just over 1.3 billion entries into the system via an OMNY tap or Metrocard last year. It’s available aggregated to hourly resolution by station complex. With that data in hand, we can calculate average hourly ridership for every weekday. This gives us a profile of what that day of the week typically looks like by hour. We exclude holidays and the like. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service provides data on severe weather events that…