I was piddling around on the Department of Transportation website and came upon some numbers that surprised me. Here is the growth rate of various kinds of transit:
I was aware that public transit ridership had gone down during the pandemic, but I hadn't realized it was down so much and had stayed down so much.
Auto ridership never dipped at all except for very briefly at the very start of the pandemic. Air travel crashed almost completely but has since recovered. Public transit also collapsed but to this day is still 40% below its pre-pandemic number.
Before the pandemic, buses and subways carried about 800 million riders per month. That fell to 150 million at the start of the pandemic and has since recovered to about 500 million.
That's 300 million missing rides per month while auto travel has stayed flat. What happened to them all?
Working from home would be my guess.
I was in San Francisco back in July and stayed downtown. At 8 o'clock in the morning on a Wednesday the streets were empty. One car if I remember and maybe 2 or 3 people milling about. I expected a vibrant downtown and instead it was damn near a ghost town.
I'm surprised bus travel didn't recover. Buses are utilized for commuting by lots of low income people, who generally do not have the sorts of jobs that can be done from home.
Valid observation, but potentially misleading. For one thing, SF is, as I understand it, one of the top locations in the country, if not in fact the number one spot, where the post-pandemic return to the office has been slow. So, the experience you had there may not really reflect nation-wide trends. Also, being somewhat familiar with SF myself, I can say that "downtown" (and I'm assuming that you're referring generally to the financial area) is commonly a slow part of town. In fact, I was also in SF over the summer, and I visited many other neighborhoods (such as the Castro, haight st., and the mission) that were indeed crowded and vibrant.
Personal anecdata: Working from home is much better than the daily commute by any means. Certainly preferable to a crowded rail car full of coughing people without masks that breaks down all the time.
NYC accounts for like 40% of all transit trips in the country. (3.8B on MTA alone out of 9.9B nationwide in 2019.) The next 5 cities (SF, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston) account for another third.
By all accounts, none of those cities’ downtowns are back to 5 days a week operation. People go in maybe 1-3 days a week in all of those cities.
And not surprisingly, when people don’t go into an office building, they stop riding transit. Since transit in the US is only time and cost competitive with the car for trips to/from the nation’s densest downtowns, it’s not surprising that transit ridership fell off a cliff.
It's amazing to me that car trips did not decrease in 2020. Personally I hardly got into my car that whole year and when I did it was pretty much only to go to the grocery store a few miles from my house. I went from driving roughly 12,000 miles in a year to about 3,000. But I guess that was just me.
Counterbalanced by my household replacing all the vacations and visits to family we would’ve flown to with very long car trips. (Note that airline travel dropped almost 100%. Yet I’m sure millions of people still needed occasionally to get from the east to west coast and everywhere else inbetween…)
I was forced, very much against my will, to greatly increase my car usage as a result of the pandemic. In fact, my own experience pretty well matches the data put forth by Kevin in this blog post. I had previously been heavily reliant on local transit, and my car was typically an option of last resort, almost an after-thought. And then, practically from one day to the next, all the transit simply shut down at the start of the pandemic.
I'm still not at all convinced that was a smart approach. But we'll probably be learning about the various pros and cons for decades to come. Long story short, I was forced to use my car for basically everything. Even simple errands like getting groceries (previously done on transit) suddenly required the use of my car.
One possible explanation, in fact, for the charts provided by Kevin is that so many people, such as myself, were forced to switch our long term habits away from transit and back to the use of our vehicles.
WFH and regional offices. I know tons of people who when they had to go back went to regional offices as it was proved people did not need to be in same place.
When was the last time you rode public transit on a regular basis? In particular, a bus.
My company (main office, Chicago) is still pretty much full WFH and a large number went in on commuter rail. My sense is many other downtown Chi companies are the same.
Public transit has become more weird and sometimes scary because the proportion of crazy people and bad addicts on any given car is now a lot higher since working people are using it less. That further discourages working people from using it.
Basically using public transit as a homeless drop in center is bad policy.
Transit was always dominated by weirdos during off peak hours. It’s just now “off peak” is basically “all day” with the loss of working people from the mix.
Sometimes when I was working in the office and I left late, I would look around at my Bart car and realize everyone around me was batshit crazy. It was a little chilling.
I doubt it has anything to do with the boom in bike sales, particularly e-bikes. Couldn't be that, right?
If your primary means of commute is public transit but now work from home, you still use your car for chores and for leisure (particularly on weekends), but your public transit card goes unused.
Maybe some of the transit riders are dead from COVID? Dead people are not regular transit users.
Subway transit (at least in NYC, which constitutes the bulk of trips) is, of course, particularly unattractive in a pandemic. Thinking back to 2019, I was commonly in a subway car literally touching 4 or 5 other people at rush hour for much of my commute (crowded enough you have to start your podcast before you get on, because you won't be able to move your arms afterward). If you're at all COVID-anxious that's not exactly ideal. I'm at a 5-day in-office firm, and co-workers who can are biking or walking rather than taking the subway.