Ridership is strong at the Silver Line’s Wiehle-Reston East and Tysons Corner stations, and over time there should be more riders at the other three stops. You can see this and other facts about Silver Line ridership

from a new data visualization on PlanItMetro.

Silver Line ridership visualization by WMATA.

PlanItMetro’s interactive maps and graphs show when and where Silver Line riders are going to and coming from, and allow users to look at riders’ entry and destination stations along with the day of the week and the time, in quarter-hour increments.

Last year, Metro posted graphs showing one week of September ridership, but this dataset represent ridership from all of October 2014, including weekdays, weekends, and holidays.

Wiehle-Reston East and Tysons Corner see far more riders than the other three, but the others could catch up as land around the stations develops.

Wiehle-Reston East gets the most passengers overall

Wiehle-Reston East currently handles the lion’s share of passengers at new Silver Line stations, partly because it’s a hub for transit riders whose bus routes take them there or who use the station’s large park-and-ride garage. Wiehle-Reston East’s ridership base is a lot like other stations at the end of Metro lines: the overwhelming majority of its riders are inbound commuters who enter on weekday mornings and exit on weekday evenings.

Interestingly, Wiehle is also the largest single commuting destination on the Silver Line. On the average weekday during the morning peak, about 1,000 passengers exit at Wiehle, compared to about 5,000 entries. Even though Tysons Corner is a jobs hub, only about 900 people exit at that station during the same period. At the four stations in the Tysons area, there are about 2,100 combined exits during this period.

The Wiehle number is impressive because more people exit at Wiehle Avenue during the morning peak than exit from any other terminal station. Wiehle’s 1,046 average exits trumps the next-best terminal, Shady Grove (with 977 average exits).

Also interestingly, Wiehle’s ratio of entries to exits is the smallest of all the terminal stations (meaning it’s the most tilted toward exits). At Wiehle Avenue, for every exit, there are 4.9 entries. That compares to 6.1 entries for every exit at New Carrollton, 7.3 at Greenbelt, and 7.5 at Largo.

Some of this ridership is likely due to people connecting to buses bound for Reston, Herndon, and Dulles Airport. But there are some office buildings around the station as well.

Ridership at Wiehle will likely change once Phase Two is complete: many passengers who currently arrive on buses, or take them to destinations like Reston Town Center or Dulles, will instead start boarding the Silver Line farther down the line.

Tysons corners the market on work, evening trips

Tysons Corner’s ridership pattern exhibits some unusual features.

Weekday rush-hour exits at Tysons Corner outnumber boardings at the station by three to one, which shows that like stations in downtown DC, Tysons Corner is near where a lot of people work. But unlike downtown DC, PlanItMetro has pointed out that a lot of people travel to Tysons Corner during off-peak and on holidays, probably to use surrounding shopping centers. In the evenings (after 7:00 pm), Tysons Corner is the busiest Silver Line station.

In terms of the ratio of entries to exits, Tysons Corner is a lot like a station on the edge of downtown. At Tysons Corner, there are 1.8 exits for every entry. Next door at Greensboro, the ratio is 1.7 exits for every entry. That compares to Dupont Circle, with a ratio of 1.9 and Rosslyn with a ratio of 1.5.

Tysons Corner and Greensboro are the only stations outside of the Beltway where exits outnumber entries during the morning peak period.

McLean, Greensboro, and Spring Hill, the Silver Line’s three other three Tysons stations, see fewer riders than Wiehle or Tysons Corner. That could be because these three have not yet been enveloped by transit-oriented development. McLean, for example, draws a lot of local residents, many of whom ride a bicycle or walk to the station.

Even though Silver Line passengers go all across the region, most of them aren’t transferring to other lines, or going to destinations in the eastern half of the metro area. Over 60% of passengers boarding at Silver Line stations on weekdays travel to stations served by the Silver Line between Wiehle and L’Enfant Plaza.

What else do you find interesting from the data visualization?