The Village runs a trade surplus in people. On an average 2025 weekday, arrivals at West 4th beat departures from 4am through 6pm, peaking with the 8am and 5pm rushes. After 7pm the flow reverses: the 9pm hour sends out 2.4 departing riders for every arriving one, and the midnight hour nearly 6 to 1. Riders come to the neighborhood all day and the subway takes them home at night.
Commuter stations empty out; West 4th refills. Wall St pushes 16.5% of its weekday riders through the turnstiles in the 5pm hour alone, then collapses: 2.2% at 9pm, 1.1% at 11pm. West 4th's evening is a plateau, holding around 7% of its day from 7pm through 9pm and 4.2% even at 11pm, nearly four times Wall St's share.
On weekends it beats the nightlife benchmark. The hours from midnight to 2am carry 9.5% of West 4th's weekend riders, ahead of Bedford Av's 6.4% and roughly triple Grand Central's 2.9%.
Arrivals and departures (first chart) are from the MTA Subway Origin-Destination Ridership Estimate: 2025: average ridership by hour and day of week with W 4 St–Wash Sq as the trip's inferred destination (arrivals) or origin (departures), averaged across all 2025 weekdays or weekend days. The hour is when the rider tapped into the system, so arrivals land at West 4th roughly 15 to 30 minutes after the hour shown. The MTA infers each rider's destination from their next tap; arrivals are modeled estimates, shown dashed.
Station comparison (second chart) is from the MTA Subway Hourly Ridership: Beginning 2025 dataset: each station's total 2025 entries by hour, expressed as a share of that station's weekday or weekend total. In absolute terms Grand Central is far larger (30.5M weekday entries in 2025 vs. 9.0M at West 4th); shares isolate the shape of each station's day.
Sources: Author's analysis of MTA data via data.ny.gov.