2025 Ticket Sales Data

I think one of the most important pieces of data the LIRR can get is ridership patterns- it tells you where the most people are coming from and want to go so you can fine-tune your service to best meet everyone's needs. And while the data the LIRR gets (through the train-by-train ridership counts they refuse to give out for no good reason and the ticket sales data aren't perfect, they give a very good general idea of what the patterns look like).

I decided to anazlye the LIRR's ticket sales data, which I retrieved through a FOIL (Freedom of Law request). This data gives a general overview of ridership between two given stations, and when you put it all together it gives a general overview of the current ridership patterns.

I can't link the actual excel sheet I used to put together the tables, graphs due to it being too large, if you'd like to see that information, you can send me an email and I'll find a way to get it to you.

Station pairs

Shown on the top of the chart are the busiest station pairs in the system. Hicksville and Ronkonkoma tickets to NY-Penn Station continue to lead, however if intra-city travel continues to grow, I could see Hicksville being overtaken by Jamaica.

Surprisingly, this year, there were only two station pairs with over a million riders, mostly thanks to the effects of the pandemic. The average number of rides across all those were 4,356, and that’s about how many rides was taken between Port Jefferson and Stony Brook. Out of the pairs ticketed, Riverhead-Merllion Avenue and Yaphank-New Hyde Padk were ranked lowest at only one ticket. Not surprising.

Highest intra-island pairs

This included ticket-pairs that were to/from two stations that aren't city terminals (NYK, GCT, KGN, FHL, WDD, HPA, LIC, JAM, NAV, ENY, ATL). 

The top of the chart was almost entirely dominated by intra-island travel among Port Washington Branch stations, and that's a good thing considering it's easy to add intra-island stops on the two-tracked Port Washington Branch! For the most part, the rest of them were rather expected.

I was planning on including more information and information about the ticket types, however, this post took a long time to make since I had to plug all the information in to make the charts, compile the information, not to mention I'm still waiting for the FOIL request to comeback, therefore it would be much harder to compile the rest of the information, therefore, I decided to just skip out on the rest, this post took much longer than it was supposed to make, but I think this gives you a good idea of how things are going.