This:<p><i>We’re beginning to see traffic volumes of people we haven’t seen on our subways since the late 1940s. That’s before the big surge in car traffic.</i><p>sounded very odd to me; it just went against my bias that &quot;everything increases&quot;. Certainly the population of NYC <i>must</i> have grown significantly in the past 65 years, and it sounds just weird that all newcomers became drivers.<p>I tried to find statistics, but the best I got was from Wikipedia which says:<p><i>Ridership continues to increase, and on September 23, 2014, more than 6.1 million people rode the subway system, establishing the highest single-day ridership since ridership was regularly monitored in 1985.</i>.<p>Which seems to support my thinking but misses out on ~35 years. Am I missing something?