Queens' Subway Stations Among NYC's Busiest In 2020: Report

QUEENS — Subway ridership plummeted last year amid the pandemic, but a new report shows that two stations in Queens remained among the busiest in the city, highlighting essential workers' commute patterns in the borough.

According to MTA station usage data analyzed by The City, the Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street station and Flushing-Main Street terminal both placed in the top 10 busiest subway stations of 2020 — all of which are usually in Manhattan.

“I have to get to work,” said home-health aide Laurina Maniram, who lives in Jamaica and commuted to Astoria through Jackson Heights throughout the pandemic. “I have no other option but the subway and a lot of people [in Queens] kept going to work,” she told The City.

Rigoberto Martinez, a speech-language pathologist who commutes to Woodside from Flushing-Main Street agrees: “It’s all about work,” he said, adding “there’s a big population that does not stop moving, even during the pandemic.”

Martinez and Maniram’s point that many Queens residents continued to commute to essential, in-person jobs during the pandemic is substantiated by data.

According to The City, the MTA’s turnstile data shows that Queens’ share of subway trips increased in 2020 and 2021, while turnstile entries plummeted in Manhattan stations.

Stations in Manhattan that used to be hubs for office workers saw the most precipitous of drops, like the 50th Street station in midtown, where the number turnstile entries dropped 88 percent from 2019 and 75 percent from 2020.

Similarly, weekday ridership ridership fell by more than 70 percent at 36 Manhattan subway stations, whereas only three stations in Queens had ridership shrink by more than 70 percent: Mets-Willets Point, Howard Beach-JFK Airport, and Aqueduct Racetrack, all of which used to attract tourists and fans who didn’t flock to the city during the pandemic.

The MTA figures come as the city’s transportation agency deals with leadership changes, and attempts to rebound from the pandemic’s losses as some New Yorkers begin to return to their office jobs.

"There should be no higher priority than ensuring we are doing all we can to bring ridership back, and as ridership comes back, so will the city's economic recovery,” said Sarah Feinberg, the Interim President of NYC Transit who Governor Andrew Cuomo just tapped to become the MTA’s new chair.