T4AMERICA BLOG News, press releases and other updates 2.8 million essential workers use transit to get to their jobs
27 Mar 2020 | Posted by Emily Mangan | 7 Comments | COVID-19, transit
A new report from TransitCenter finds that 2.8 million transit riders are considered “essential workers” during the COVID-19 emergency, underscoring just how essential it is to keep transit running. Under normal circumstances, they account for more than a third of total transit commuters in the country.
Transit is part of the public health response to COVID-19. Transit agencies across the country transport millions of essential personnel—including hospital staff, grocery store workers, and pharmacists—to and from jobs everyday. It’s essential to keep transit running frequently and reliably to get these workers where they need to go as millions of others are forced to forgo their usual transit trips to abide by “shelter in place” mandates.
The latest report from TransitCenter finds that nationwide over 600,000 transit commuters work at hospitals, in doctor’s offices, or as home health providers; 165,000 people take transit to jobs in grocery stores or pharmacies; and 150,000 workers in social services commute on transit. On a normal day before this crisis, essential workers accounted for 38 percent of transit commuters in New York City, 33 percent in Seattle, and 36 percent in Miami.
Now that transit agencies across the country have started to reduce service frequency and cut routes due to financial shortfalls and lost fare revenue, many of these essential workers can’t easily get to work. With less frequent service, buses and subways are more likely to be crowded and therefore unsafe due to the inability to adequately keep a safe distance from others.
If service stays frequent, TransitCenter writes, “at stops, stations, and on vehicles, commuters will have space to distance themselves from each other, protecting themselves and others from potential virus spread.” Maintaining frequent transit service will help these workers stay safe and healthy.
According to a previous report put out earlier this week, transit agencies could see an annual shortfall of $26-$38 billion. It’s welcome news that Congress has struck a deal to provide $25 billion in emergency aid for transit, but we’ll need sustained help from Congress to keep service running during this pandemic and keep millions of essential workers working. And we’ll need transit to be able to return to full strength in the aftermath of this crisis and help fuel our recovery by carrying millions of people back to work.
Lessons from the last Recession
What would it look like if transit service is unable to survive through the pandemic and bounce back with reliable service to help fuel our economic recovery? We don’t have to guess—we can look back at what happened during the Great Recession a decade ago. Because of declining sales tax revenues, agencies were being forced to cut service, raise fares, and lay off employees—even as transit ridership was actually on the upswing back then. At T4America, we chronicled the impact on riders, and gathered hundreds of stories from real people who were affected:
I work closing shift at a restaurant in downtown Sacramento and take the bus to and from work five days a week. I get off work at 10:40 and the last bus is at 10:50 so I have to run to make it. Sometimes I need to stay late to finish closing the restaurant after a busy night and don’t get a bus. The taxi fare is $40 to get home. Now the bus schedule might change with reduced hours. I don’t want to get a car because it is expensive, dangerous, and I don’t have a license to drive. Driving without a license will be my only option with the new hours. Pablo – Sacramento, CA
I live in North San Diego county and because of transit routes being canceled I have been unable to take better paying jobs and it has cut down on recreational activities. It takes longer to go to the grocery store, I have to walk farther after I get off the bus and times have been changed so I end up missing appointments. Leah – Encinitas, CA
The cuts in the bus service occurred a few years ago. The one that has been difficult to adjust to, is [the route] by the hospital where I have doctor’s appointments. The service was cut from one hour to every half-hour. If I don’t want to wait too long, I can walk a few blocks to another stop, but it is a more difficult walk for me as I am blind, and the crossing of one of the streets is somewhat more dangerous. I prefer to take the bus instead of using the ADA paratransit service when I can. Janet – Hartford, CT
That’s just a small slice of what we heard 10 years ago when transit agencies were struggling in the face of a recession. Transit service is vital today and Congress’ plan to provide transit agencies with $25 billion in emergency assistance will provide a lifeline—for now. But we don’t know how long this crisis will continue. And we’ll never be able to get our economy back on its feet without robust transit service in cities large and small that collectively move millions of people.
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Miller and geography PhD student Luyu Liu are conducting an analysis of transit demand on public transportation systems across the United States. Using data from a popular public transit app, Liu and Miller are looking at how public transit demand declined at different rates around the country. They’re also examining how far those declines went before hitting a “floor” of essential travelers — people who rely on public transportation for essential travel, often to front-line jobs.
Their preliminary results reveal that declines in transit demand depend on multiple factors. Places like California that are more car-dependent see a larger decline in transit demand than more public transit-dependent regions like the Northeast. Another significant factor is the job mix of a city and whether workers can telecommute.
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t for Harvey Miller, the Bob and Mary Reusche Chair in Geographic Information Science in the Department of Geography and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA), the stillness pervading Columbus presented an unprecedented moment to understand how a city moves and what happens when it stops.
“Mobility is essential to economics, to society, to humanity,” Miller said. “This decline in mobility is really unprecedented in human history, and it can tell us a lot about human dynamics, about urban dynamics. …This is a very profound natural experiment.”
To help capture the implications of the coronavirus on transportation and mobility, Miller and geography PhD student Luyu Liu are conducting an analysis of transit demand on public transportation systems across the United States. Using data from a popular public transit app, Liu and Miller are looking at how public transit demand declined at different rates around the country. They’re also examining how far those declines went before hitting a “floor” of essential travelers — people who rely on public transportation for essential travel, often to front-line jobs.
Their preliminary results reveal that declines in transit demand depend on multiple factors. Places like California that are more car-dependent see a larger decline in transit demand than more public transit-dependent regions like the Northeast. Another significant factor is the job mix of a city and whether workers can telecommute.
The above graph displays the decline in COTA bus demand since February 15, 2020. Liu says across the U.S., demand started to decrease significantly around March 6.
In Columbus, Liu and Miller found about a 60% decrease in transit demand, meaning 40% of Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) users are potentially essential workers who rely on the service as a necessary form of transportation. That figure places Columbus in the middle of COVID-19 related transit demand declines across the country.
“These are people who are traveling to do essential jobs for whom public transit is essential,” Miller said. “This vividly illustrates something about public transit: It is not a business. It is a critical service for urban civilization. If we want our grocery stores stocked, if we want things cleaned, if we want our police officers policing the streets and if we want our people working in government, we need good public transit.”
Liu said analyzing the demographics of those still using public transportation can also illuminate which groups are at higher risk of contracting the coronavirus. Cities with larger African American, Hispanic or female populations are more likely to see smaller transit demand declines.
“This is the very terrifying reality we’re facing right now, that women and people of color actually end up facing more of the risk,” Liu said.
COVID-19 has illuminated a challenge facing public transportation and broader conceptions of sustainability. Urban sustainability needs density, mass transit, walking and biking, but that can run counter to managing a pandemic since people need to spread out, Miller said.
Potential options for balancing those two interests are going fare-free to prevent bus operators from having to handle riders’ money as well as limiting the number of people allowed on buses to enable proper social distancing. However, that would mean public transit systems like COTA would need to adapt to additional revenue decreases despite already tight budgets across the board.
Harvey Miller, left, and Luyu Liu, right, worked together to analyze transit demand data across the U.S.
“We have to figure out how to live densely and move sustainably, but in a way that we can balance our resilience to pandemics.” Miller said. “There are ways of doing this, not that it will be easy.”
Still, Miller hopes the silver lining in all of this will be people discovering they enjoy walking and biking around a city not crowded with cars, encouraging them to imagine how cities could be different if they adopted a multimodal transportation system.
“We’re not talking about getting rid of cars, just putting them into their proper place within cities,” Miller said. “When we talk about sustainable urban mobility, we’re talking about a system where people rely on walking for short distances, biking for medium distance, public transit for longer distances, and cars filling in the niches.”
Looking into the future, beyond COVID-19, Miller hopes Columbus can learn from this crisis so that going forward, communities can respond more gracefully to similar shocks such as other pandemics, climate shocks and extreme storms.
“There are more coming in the future, including, as [former Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld once said, ‘unknown unknowns,’” Miller said. “We want to make sure that Columbus, the nation and the world are more resilient to these shocks. A lot of this comes down to knowing what happens to our cities and our economies when a shock like this happens so we can plan for a less shocking future.”Computational SciencesSocial SciencesCOVID-19FacultyResearch
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Medium
Who’s left riding public transit? Hint: it’s not white people.
Millions continue to ride buses and trains. We surveyed them: of course they’re essential workers. They’re also mostly female, people of colour, and poorly paid.
TransitFollowApr 27 · 6 min read
During a single week in March, our app usage dropped 30%. By week two, it was down 70%. Then it bottomed out: for the past few weeks, our app Transit has been holding steady, with usage down 77% below normal. That’s 77% fewer people taking the bus, the train, bikeshare, scooters — all the modes you rely on when you don’t have your own car. And for us, that’s actually great news! 77% of our regular riders are safe, presumably at home, binge-watching Tiger King, working if they’re able, popping out for the occasional 200-metre egg dash to the grocery store. But who are the 23% left riding?
We surveyed our riders to find out: not just for our own curiosity, but for our transit agency partners. We wanted to show how public transit was being used during COVID-19. The better an agency understands who’s riding its buses and trains, the better the service they can provide.
We expected to see a surge in healthcare workers. What we also saw was a steep drop-off of white (and male) riders. Most of those left riding are women, and people of colour.
First: why are people still using Transit?
The people left using our app Transit are, by and large, essential workers. They’re the folks keeping the lights of society on, but many of them don’t see themselves as heroes at all.
They continue to use Transit to get real-time info for their buses and trains. (This real-time info is critical, since transit agencies are making constant service changes in response to driver shortages and reduced demand.) Millions of these essential workers check Transit so they aren’t left waiting for an out-of-service bus or train. We surveyed 25,000 of them. Here’s what we found.
1. The people still riding public transit are overwhelmingly female.
Pre-crisis, Transit had a 50/50 gender split. Now 56% of our riders are female, while only 40% are male. In some cities like Philadelphia, more than 68% of riders are women. If “essential workers” are indeed the ones taking public transit, women seem to be significantly more essential.
2. More black (women) and Latino (women) are still riding the bus.
The racial makeup of Transit has shifted under quarantine. We’ve seen a remarkable “white flight” from public transit:
- Among whites, public transit ridership has dropped by half
- Black and Latino riders now make up the majority of Transit’s users
People of colour who use Transit are more likely to be female, too: ~70% of our black riders are female.
But gender and race aren’t the only dividing lines: language is as well. In Los Angeles, you can see that while many English- and Spanish-speakers have stopped riding, the decline among Spanish speakers has been more muted.
3. Where are riders traveling? To healthcare and food jobs.
Among those still riding, very few (10%) take public transit for “leisure” reasons. Even fewer are using transit to get to school (2%).
The bulk of people still using public transit — 92% — are using it to commute to work.
Almost 20% of them work in “food prep”: these are your grocery store workers, your bakers, your butchers, your take-out chefs and the folks manning the liquor store libation station.
People identifying as black or Hispanic were most likely to be working these jobs than jobs in other categories.
Another ~20% of remaining riders work in healthcare. In some cities, like New York City, up to 35% of remaining riders work in healthcare. Without adequate transit service, we risk overcrowding —which puts healthcare workers (and everyone else) at greater risk.
4. People riding are largely “essential workers”. But those indispensable workers are not indispensably paid.
Barely 5% of our remaining riders are high-income workers.More than 70% make under $50,000 a year.
High-income “computer workers” like programmers and lawyers were more likely able to work from home, too.
5. Do these riders have other options? Not really.
Only 9% of Transit riders have a car, while another 6% have access to one if they need to drive. For the remaining 85%, public transit is their go-to method of transportation.
Unsurprisingly, car access is lowest among low-income workers. The richer you are, the more mobility alternatives you have during the pandemic. No surprises there.
Public transit during the recovery
By better understanding who is riding public transit, we hope we can help agencies and governments make informed choices about transit operations during the pandemic. Things are changing at warp speed — and our team is working tirelessly to make new information available in the app, in real-time.
While many riders have stopped taking public transit, essential workers continue to rely on Transit to get around. Public transit workers have been doing a terrific job, and so has our team at Transit — we’re making sure riders aren’t left waiting at the stop, or missing a shift, or getting on a crowded bus when they don’t have to. That’s what keeps us motivated during this strange and prolonged fever dream: Public transit is what makes “essential work” possible.
However, the questions about equity raised by our rider survey are impossible to ignore. Who society deems “indispensable”, and who is actually getting paid like they’re “indispensable” could not be more divergent. And the amount of “white flight” risks making public transit more marginalized than it already is. When things settle down, and when more people begin to return to public transit, we’re all going to have to ask ourselves some tough questions about how our transportation dollars are allocated. Our society’s dependence on good public transit has never been so obvious.
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Wired
ALEX DAVIES AARIAN MARSHALLTRANSPORTATION03.30.2020 07:00 AM
Public Transit Cuts Hurt ‘Essential’ Workers Who Need It Most
Bus and train systems are trimming schedules amid plummeting ridership and mounting losses. But riders are being forced to choose between health and financial security.
JASON YOUNG GOT up at 4 am Friday. It was his daughter’s birthday, so he’d taken the early shift at the Giant Food grocery store in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he manages the seafood department. Most of his colleagues drive to work, but Young doesn’t have a car, so he commutes from his home in southeast Washington, DC, on the Metro. On good days, it’s a 45-minute trip. Track work and delays can nearly double that. When Young wants to get to work by 7 am, it means waking up in the wee hours. But as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority cuts service in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, Young says leaving home early may not be enough.
To protect its workers and conserve supplies, Metro has closed 19 of its 91 stations until further notice, without providing shuttle buses to fill in the gaps. Those cuts haven’t yet hampered Young’s commute. But if the stations nearest his home or his store shut down, he’d have trouble getting to his store at all. “I won’t be able to get to work,” he says. “I’d have to file for unemployment.”
“Essential” workers who are still toiling at grocery stores, drug stores, and health care facilities face the same dilemma. Los Angeles has cut bus service by 15 to 20 percent and is running fewer trains. The Bay Area’s BART system has seen ridership plunge by 90 percent compared with this time last year, and has cut three hours of night service amidst a projected $25 million monthly loss. New York City’s MTA has modified its schedule. The agency that runs Seattle’s buses is cutting service and has stopped collecting fares to reduce interactions between workers and riders.
Read all of our coronavirus coverage here.
Smaller systems, like the ones in Great Falls, Montana, and Green Bay, Wisconsin, have canceled service altogether. In those areas, many workers can drive or walk to work. The employees of the Save-a-Lot grocery store in Green Bay haven’t had any trouble, says manager Rob Schroeder. “A lot of them actually live close by.”
Losing the ability to get to his job at Giant Food is a worst-case scenario for Young, but the very act of commuting amid a spreading pandemic—1,651 people were infected in DC, Maryland, and Virginia as of Friday afternoon—isn’t all that much better. A precipitous drop in ridership has made social distancing inside trains easier, but Young would rather not have to spend so much time aboard. “I’m a little concerned,” he says. “I’ve got kids I’ve gotta go home to.”News of the future, now.Get WIRED.Subscribe Now
Young’s fellow “essential” workers in many places rely on shared modes of transit to get to work. In New York City, most transit systems are still running, but “having to be out at all is a very stressful thing,” says Nikki Kateman, the political and communications director for Local 338 of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which also represents some health care professionals.
“I’m a little concerned. I’ve got kids I’ve gotta go home to.”
JASON YOUNG, SUPERMARKET WORKER AND TRANSIT RIDER
Preliminary results from a 1,000-person survey taken by New York City-based Rider’s Alliance last week show that two-thirds of respondents felt the crisis has forced them to choose between their health and financial security. But the respondents split evenly over whether the city’s transit agency had done enough to protect their health and safety. Half said they hoped the MTA would maintain regular service levels.
The other workers stuck using transit are, of course, the men and women operating those subways, buses, trains, and street cars. The danger is real: At least four transit workers—two in New York City, one in Washington state, and one in Massachusetts—have been killed by the virus.
In Detroit earlier this month, bus drivers who are members of the Amalgamated Transit Union used a one-day work stoppage to successfully demand that the city clean buses more often and provide them better protective equipment and portable restrooms along their routes (as the businesses whose restrooms they typically use are now closed). Detroit, like many cities, now asks passengers to board buses via the rear door and has eliminated fares.Most Popular
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For several weeks, the Transport Workers Union of America has called for changes to protect workers both physically and financially, with a good deal of success. New York’s MTA provided face masks for subway and bus drivers. Philadelphia has promised to pay transit workers for 40 hours a week, even though the city’s transit system has switched to a weekend schedule.
“It’s a lot of common-sense stuff,” says John Samuelson, the union’s international president. “Workers need to be allowed to take care of themselves, their families, and their coworkers.” And to keep those who need to move, moving.
Updated, 3-30-20, 3:50pm ET: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the transit system on Cape Cod had canceled service. It has reduced its service.
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Transit Center
March 24, 2020Transit Is Essential: 2.8 Million U.S. Essential Workers Ride Transit to Their JobsSHARE THIS POST ON SOCIALShare on facebookShare on twitterShare on linkedin
Workers classified as essential during the COVID-19 emergency account for 36 percent of total transit commuters in the United States. Service must be maintained to allow for safe spacing on buses and trains.
Transit networks, like hospital systems and food supply chains, are vital to the success of the COVID-19 public health response. They transport millions of essential personnel to and from their jobs every day, including hospital staff, grocery store workers, pharmacists, social service providers, and others who are called to work even as many Americans hunker down under “shelter in place” mandates.
According to 2018 Census data, an estimated 2.8 million American workers in essential industries commute to work on transit — about 36 percent of all transit commuters. On a normal day, essential workers account for 38 percent of transit commuters in New York City, 33 percent in Seattle, and 36 percent in Miami.
While transit ridership is much lower than usual as Americans follow the imperative to stay at home as much as possible, these essential workers must continue to have access to transit service to keep people safe, healthy, and fed. And because riders should maintain six feet of distance from other people at transit stops and on vehicles, there is very little leeway, if any, to reduce service while maintaining public health. Running service under the current conditions of drastically lower revenue will require substantial assistance.
Nationwide, over 600,000 transit commuters work at hospitals, in doctor’s offices, or as home health providers; 165,000 people take transit to jobs in grocery stores or pharmacies; and 150,000 workers in social services commute on transit.
In New York City, 840,000 essential workers take transit to get to work, including 100,000 hospital workers and nearly 150,000 other health care professionals.
Source: 2018 American Community Survey and IPUMS-USA
If service stays reliable, essential workers who take on long, chaotic shifts won’t also be stressed about their bus or train making them late. If agencies maintain the frequency of service, essential workers won’t have to pad their tight schedules with more time waiting for the next trip. And at stops, stations, and on vehicles, commuters will have space to distance themselves from each other, protecting themselves and others from potential virus spread.
Some transit agencies have pledged to essential industry that they’ll be there with frequent service. Some are ramping up service along routes that serve medical centers or adjusting schedules to meet the needs of medical staff. Others have made some service cuts to reduce costs amid budget uncertainty.
It is unclear how long agencies can maintain service provision without an injection of emergency aid, although in some cases time is clearly running short already. What’s clear is that millions of frontline workers will continue to commute throughout this crisis, and transit must continue to operate frequently and reliably to safely get them to their jobs.
APPENDIX
Workforce data are from the 2018 American Community Survey and were collected using the IPUMS-USA database. (Steven Ruggles et. al. IPUMS USA: Version 10.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2020. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V10.0). Industries are defined by their 4-digit NAICS codes.
Essential workforce counts workers who belong to essential industries, which will continue to operate during COVID-19 “shelter in place” orders. Elected officials have made local determinations about which industries are “essential,” but these categorizations are broadly similar across cities and states. For this analysis, we modified this list of “essential” industries, released by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf on March 19 and taking effect on March 21. Due to massive cuts in operations, we estimated that only 10% of restaurant workers and 10% of hotel workers (in traveler accommodation sector) are still working.
