Welcome back to Ten Blocks. This is Seth Barron, Associate Editor of City Journal.

It's no exaggeration to say that New York City is unimaginable without its subway system.

Millions of people rely on it every day in much the same way that most Americans rely on their cars.

I'm joined today by Nicole Jolinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

and a contributing editor

to City Journal to discuss her latest report, New York's economic future rides on its

subways. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Nicole.

Thank you, Seth. Thanks for inviting me back. So, what's the story with the subways? Is

ridership up or down? Well, yes. Ridership is up. It basically doubled between

1977 and 2016, but it's been going down for the past two years, although we can talk about the

complexities of estimating that later.

But if it's, it's, one might think, it's just because the population went up.

And that's, that's true.

We have a record population in the city, you know, parts of the city that are served by

the subway, excluding Staten Island, is up about 15% since 1990.

Number of jobs is up about 40%.

And tourism has more than doubled to more than 62 million people a year.

Okay.

So basically, is subway ridership up 15% matching the population? I mean,

you said it's doubled. I don't understand how did so many people start taking the subway if

the population hasn't gone up that much. Yes, and that's the question that I tried to answer in the

subway. I wanted to know who is

...