Metro Tops a Million Weekday Riders Again, Mostly Thanks to Rail

Rail carries one in four Metro rides but drove nearly three-quarters of September's growth; D Line weekday ridership rose 114%.

Four months after three subway stations opened under Wilshire Boulevard, the Metro D Line carried more than twice as many weekday riders in September as it had a year earlier.

That jump helped lift the whole Los Angeles Metro system past a line it hadn't crossed in more than a year: 1,022,776 boardings on an average September weekday, Streetsblog L.A. reported Tuesday, from figures Metro released Oct. 16. It's a comeback, not a record. Streetsblog L.A. says Metro last topped a million in May 2025, a month before a 30-month growth streak broke, a break it blames on stepped-up immigration enforcement.

The number that explains September is a split. Rail made up about one in four of Metro's 27,281,003 boardings last month. Work last September's totals back out of Metro's own percentages, though, and rail added roughly 739,000 boardings over the year, while buses, which carry three of every four rides, added about 284,000. A quarter of the riders produced nearly three-quarters of the growth.

Most of that rail story runs along Wilshire. Metro put D Line growth at 114% on weekdays and nearly 93% across the full week. The stations at La Brea, Fairfax and La Cienega opened May 8, and Metro said in a June 15 release that they added 8,000 to 10,000 riders a day in their first partial month.

In that same release, Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins made a prediction. "We expect the rail numbers to increase as more people discover the convenience," she said. Rail ridership was up 12.4% in September. Metro also credited a crowded calendar, from BTS's multi-night run at SoFi Stadium to the opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Exposition Park.

The September release has at least one slip. It lists 244,680 as the average weekday rail boardings for the entire system, then gives the identical figure as the A Line's weekday average. The A Line's whole month came to 2,083,094 boardings, under 70,000 a day, so the A Line number can't be right.

The month-to-month jump looks bigger than the yearly one. Weekdays averaged 952,906 boardings in August, according to Metro's Sept. 23 release, about 70,000 fewer than September. But fall usually runs busier than summer, which is why Metro measures each month against the same one a year earlier. By that yardstick, weekdays were up 4.4%.

The next stretch of subway, through Beverly Hills and Century City and on to Westwood near UCLA, is still under construction. Meanwhile, most riders are on buses, where growth has been uneven: bus ridership was down 4.9% year over year in May and up 3.3% in August. Nearly 20% of September's rides came through free or discounted fare programs, and Metro said its LIFE program, for riders with qualifying incomes, grew 35%.

Buses carried 20,582,666 of September's rides. They grew 1.4%.

Source: la.streetsblog.org, retrieved October 21, 2026. Other sources: metro.net, metro.net (2), metro.net (3).