Metro Platform
Originally uploaded by tbridge

Before last week, the best day on Metro came this past Summer, with 854,000 riders. Yesterday smashed that record. Metro has now released the numbers for yesterday’s totals and they’re astronomical. 1.12M riders on the Metro. Another 423,000 rode Metrobus yesterday, leading to a total public transit ridership of 1.54M people.

While it’s safe to say that most of them were headed to the Mall for the Inauguration, not all of them were, which means the crowd estimates around 1.4 million are sounding more and more credible for me.

I’m going to come right out and say it: I don’t think this record will fall in the next 5-10 years. While growth has been strong for metro with gas prices on the rise, I can’t see 1.12M riders in a day being topped without some sort of massive event in DC that will bring people from all around. The broad appeal of the Obama Inauguration is going to be hard to beat.

Maybe another Tibetan-Freedom-style concert down on the Mall with some monster names would do it, but even then, I can’t fathom them breaking the record.