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Article snippet: Over the last two years, riders have been leaving the New York subways in a slow but steady decline never before seen during an era when population and jobs have surged in the city. Meet one of them. Rich Gilberto, 30, an accountant in the film industry, had a two-hour ride to Lower Manhattan from the north Bronx on Oct. 29, 2015. It was another maddening journey of 20 miles that took at least twice as long as it should have, one more last straw. “You can’t call it an express train if it stops a dozen times in the tunnel,” Mr. Gilberto wrote on Twitter. That day, it turned out, the New York subways set a modern record by carrying 6,222,769 passengers — double the ridership of the busiest days of the 1980s and early 1990s. As the city’s booming prosperity continued into 2016 and 2017, transit officials naturally expected even more riders to arrive. The opposite happened. The number of people taking the subways dropped last year, and through the first nine months of this year is down by nearly 17 million over the same period in 2015. “The correlation between employment and ridership has broken down,” Tim Mulligan, a senior vice president at New York City Transit, told members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board this week. Why? Among many proposed explanations — more people working from home, spells of bad weather, competition from ride-hailing apps like Uber — one likely factor looms over all. The mass transit system has been failing. Transit crises ... Link to the full article to read more