Plus 2020 was primed to be the sixth consecutive year of what Taylor calls a “disturbing trend”: U.S. transit ridership has been in decline since 2014, even as transit agencies have added service on the whole. Much of that new service has come in light-rail extensions and some bus-rapid transit lines usually designed to attract “discretionary riders,” or people who can afford to choose between driving and transit, and often financed through sales tax measures. Explanations for ridership’s downward slide during these years abound. Cheap gas and easy credit for auto loans increased the appeal of car use, while service quality deteriorated on the older parts of transit systems. Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft emerged, and a housing affordability crisis pushed many people outside the range of reliable transit.
It isn’t clear how many of these trips were made by essential workers, but analyses based on census data show that more than 30% of normal transit riders have jobs that have been deemed pandemic-critical. Individuals riding to work right now are also less likely to have the option to drive, and they are more likely to be people of color, as evidenced in photos of crowded subways and buses that have sparked online outrage in recent weeks. Transit, an urban mobility navigation app, has found that 68% of the people using it to plan bus and metro trips right now are women, most of them black and Latinx.
… These circumstances point to a potential shift in the way transit is used, viewed, and potentially funded, experts said. Traditionally, a successful transit system is one with a lot of riders, with packed buses and cars and a large share of revenue derived from passenger fares. But in a world where social distancing means life or death, and a 40-foot bus has an eight-passenger capacity limit, emphasizing ridership and fare recovery as the metrics of success may no longer make sense. Yet the nurses, orderlies, grocery store workers and pharmacists boarding today are proof that transit itself is a critical social institution. “Transit agencies should be switching their brains to serving those riders,” said El-Geneidy. “We have to accept that public transport is an essential service. We can’t think about it as a for-profit organization that can make money from ridership.”
That could create a stronger demand for federal funding for transit, instead of local agencies continuing rely on fares and tax measures tied to projects like light-rail expansions sold to affluent voters with the promise of congestion relief.
Brian Taylor: “For many years we have a lot of aspirations for transit: We want it to beat traffic, fight climate change, and revitalize communities,” he said. “But the two things it has demonstrably done in last half century is provide mobility for those without — whether that’s due to age, income, or disability — and allow highly agglomerated places function. My educated guess is that we will see the rise of transit as a social service.”
Laura Bliss, CityLab, Bloomberg, May 6, 2020 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-06/a-post-pandemic-reality-check-for-transit-boosters
Top transit systems in the U.S. have seen 70% to 90% ridership losses as commuters have been laid off, worked from home, or opted for other means of travel since March. With few passengers, daunting finances, sick operators, and a heightened imperative to sanitize, agencies have dramatically scaled back service
**
In 1918, streetcars were the top urban transportation mode in the United States. And they were packed: Americans made about 140 trips per capita, about 15 billion trips total, that year.
Then came the Spanish flu. As influenza ripped through cities, crowded systems were forced to make health-centric changes, including requiring masks on passengers, limiting streetcar capacity, and staggering commute hours to keep riders distanced. Some vehicles were briefly decommissioned due to a shortage of operators. Still, the popularity of mass transit did not suffer dramatically in the succeeding years — at least not until the Great Depression put a quarter of the country out of work and, later, when the private automobile began to displace it.
What about today? Coronavirus has walloped bus and rail networks. The top transit systems in the U.S. have seen 70% to 90% ridership losses as commuters have been laid off, worked from home, or opted for other means of travel since March. With few passengers, daunting finances, sick operators, and a heightened imperative to sanitize, agencies have dramatically scaled back service. San Francisco’s Municipal Transit Agency has ceased rail operations and eliminated nearly 70% of its bus network. In Washington, D.C., buses are serving just 26 “lifeline” routes and Metro trains are running on Saturday schedules. The New York subway has stopped running 24 hours a day for the first time in 115 years.
Transit’s current situation is partly a reflection of the overall travel freeze on driving, flying, and all other modes during stay-at-home orders in major cities. But when lockdowns ease, there are reasons that transit commuters in particular may not return in force.
First, bus and rail ridership tends to be more sensitive to economic changes than other modes, and the financial effects of coronavirus are poised to stretch long into the future, said Brian Taylor, an urban planning professor and director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Second, some proportion of would-be passengers are likely to continue to work remotely, while others may change their commute patterns to driving or biking. “We know that people will be scared to use public transportation from a health perspective,” said Ahmed El-Geneidy, a professor of urban planning at McGill University who has studied transit ridership. Based on what’s happening in China, a post-pandemic car sales boom may be in the offing. “For many years we have a lot of aspirations for transit: We want it to beat traffic, fight climate change, and revitalize communities.”
Third, assuming rider demand and revenue remain low, transit agencies may have to keep service cuts even after lockdowns lift, despite the fact that more vehicles, not fewer, are needed to allow for social distancing. Academic literature shows that such cuts themselves can be rider-deterrents. “There’s an elasticity that shows if you cut service by 10%, you can generally expect ridership goes down 3-6%,” said Greg Erhardt, a civil engineering professor at the University of Kentucky who specializes in travel behavior and transportation planning.
A final and pernicious factor is that 2020 was primed to be the sixth consecutive year of what Taylor calls a “disturbing trend”: U.S. transit ridership has been in decline since 2014, even as transit agencies have added service on the whole. Much of that new service has come in light-rail extensions and some bus-rapid transit lines usually designed to attract “discretionary riders,” or people who can afford to choose between driving and transit, and often financed through sales tax measures. Explanations for ridership’s downward slide during these years abound. Cheap gas and easy credit for auto loans increased the appeal of car use, while service quality deteriorated on the older parts of transit systems. Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft emerged, and a housing affordability crisis pushed many people outside the range of reliable transit.
In Southern California, Taylor and his colleagues have found that the largest drops in ridership have come from groups that were traditionally the heaviest, most economically dependent users of transit. Lower-income immigrants in particular have abandoned buses as car ownership among those communities has increased. While the share of discretionary riders has increased slightly, thanks to increased investment into rail and rapid bus service geared toward more affluent commuters, “their added trips are still overwhelmed by lost trips from others,” Taylor said.
Who will ride in the wake of coronavirus? Passengers will inevitably return in dense cities with extensive systems, such as New York City, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, where transit is critical for thriving urban economies to function, Taylor said. But the best indication of the future face of transit may be the people on board right now. And there are still a lot of them: By the end of March, New York City subway ridership cratered to 10% of its usual five million weekday trips, but that still meant it was providing more than 500,000 trips. The 65% ridership drop on L.A.’s Metro buses, reported in mid-April, still equates to 500,000 daily boardings.
It isn’t clear how many of these trips were made by essential workers, but analyses based on census data show that more than 30% of normal transit riders have jobs that have been deemed pandemic-critical. Individuals riding to work right now are also less likely to have the option to drive, and they are more likely to be people of color, as evidenced in photos of crowded subways and buses that have sparked online outrage in recent weeks. Transit, an urban mobility navigation app, has found that 68% of the people using it to plan bus and metro trips right now are women, most of them black and Latinx.
There is one grim new potential reservoir of future transit riders, Taylor said: lower-income households that have bought vehicles in the last few years. Their car-owning status could be vulnerable to an economic downturn.
These circumstances point to a potential shift in the way transit is used, viewed, and potentially funded, experts said. Traditionally, a successful transit system is one with a lot of riders, with packed buses and cars and a large share of revenue derived from passenger fares. But in a world where social distancing means life or death, and a 40-foot bus has an eight-passenger capacity limit, emphasizing ridership and fare recovery as the metrics of success may no longer make sense. Yet the nurses, orderlies, grocery store workers and pharmacists boarding today are proof that transit itself is a critical social institution. “Transit agencies should be switching their brains to serving those riders,” said El-Geneidy. “We have to accept that public transport is an essential service. We can’t think about it as a for-profit organization that can make money from ridership.”
That could create a stronger demand for federal funding for transit, instead of local agencies continuing rely on fares and tax measures tied to projects like light-rail expansions sold to affluent voters with the promise of congestion relief. For Taylor, that may mean something like a reality check for transit-boosters.
“For many years we have a lot of aspirations for transit: We want it to beat traffic, fight climate change, and revitalize communities,” he said. “But the two things it has demonstrably done in last half century is provide mobility for those without — whether that’s due to age, income, or disability — and allow highly agglomerated places function. My educated guess is that we will see the rise of transit as a social service.”
If that sounds like giving up on transit, look to the cities that are using the crisis as a moment to revamp their systems with social equity as a priority. El-Geneidy and Erhardt both pointed to San Francisco as a leader, where the SFMTA redesigned bus service virtually overnight in early April to focus on just a few dozen routes mostly serving commutes into the city’s downtown core and major hospitals. About 100,000 people are still riding every day.
Jeffrey Tumlin, the executive director of the SFMTA, acknowledged that not all of the 100-plus routes lost to coronavirus are necessarily going to return. But he strikes an optimistic tone: He believes that a transit network that focuses more narrowly on frequent, more reliable service along fewer routes may serve the city better in the end. While the streets are still empty, the SFMTA hopes to rethink its approach to transportation writ large. Facing a sharp rise in vehicle traffic and fatalities, and seeking to slash carbon emissions, the city had already moved to ban private vehicles on its central downtown corridor, and has spent the past year studying congestion pricing.
With little vehicle traffic, “we’re in an extraordinary period of time to rethink how we manage our streets,” Tumlin said in an interview in April. “We have to set the city up not only for a stronger recovery, but also for a more urban, humane economy.”
**
Bloomberg, City Lab, July 2020
One hot day in my hometown of Riverside, California, 25 years ago, I finally discerned the source of the clicking sound I often heard as I walked down the city’s sidewalks — it turned out to be people in nearby cars locking their doors at my approach. The drivers saw their vehicles as a source of freedom and a space of safety; they saw me, a young Black man on a sidewalk, as a threat.
At that moment, I understood those cars not just as a polluter of my neighborhood, but as a social barrier as well. And I realized we would never see or understand one another in a community geared toward auto-oriented spaces.
More than 50 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. called urban public transportation “a genuine civil rights issue.” But as the recent wave of protests against racial inequality illustrate, the U.S. has so far failed to address the implications of racist transportation investment and policies. The nation’s infrastructure investments have promoted systemic racism, impacting generations of African Americans. King’s comments resonate with me, not only because I’m now the director of policy development and research at the American Public Transit Association, but because my family experienced it firsthand.
My mom grew up in South Los Angeles and was there during the 1965 Watts uprising. As the flames burned and looting went on for nights, her household ran low on food. My mother asked my grandmother, “Should I go and get us food like everyone else is doing?” My grandmother said, “We do not do that in this house.”
In a deeply divided city, with limited public transportation options and racist laws on the books, many Black Angelenos could not participate in California’s 1960s boom. My grandmother cleaned homes, but since many of the better-paying jobs were hours away by bus, she had to work locally; thus, she made just $5 a day. The family was treated like second-class citizens by those in charge, including the Los Angeles Police Department. At one point, they had to endure a misplaced police raid that destroyed their hard-won property — the officers had the wrong house, and there was no apology.
After the 1965 uprising, my mother’s family moved to Riverside, a distant exurb on the edge of the desert in Southern California. That was the community in which I was born and raised. I would need my family’s values to make it through my journey with structural racism and white supremacy. The 1980s and 1990s were a difficult time for Southern California. The end of the Cold War led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs as factories closed and military bases were downsized or “realigned” out of existence. The LAPD’s treatment of black men lit the fuse of another uprising in 1992. And Governor Pete Wilson further inflamed racial tensions to win reelection in 1994. I started to see that systemic racism and homophobia were structures that one must contest through power and political persuasion.
I decided to learn how to best persuade power to concede to demands — first through protest actions and testifying to regulatory and legislative bodies, then through advocacy research experience. I acquired theoretical frames, with a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. And I entered public transportation as a career, to reestablish the public realm, provide the space for a new social contract to emerge, and connect communities to opportunity.
While recent events make it painfully clear that we may be as far from equity as we ever were, they have also revealed important lessons. As the nation reflects on Black Lives Matter, it must reprioritize its investments in people and places. Here’s how public transit can play a more powerful role in this process.
- We need to address transit governance. In some communities, the structure of governance leads to project decisions that promote the needs of predominantly white suburban commuters at the expense of communities of color with higher transit use and more supportive land use. Often a transit district that includes suburban communities may prioritize extensions of light rail lines into the suburbs over the more expensive but compelling transit needs of denser, more diverse urban communities.
- Transit advocacy is about a lot more than transit. We may spend billions on a new light rail system, but if spending on the unhoused is insufficient, the trains will be full of homeless people. If communities shirk their duty to build and maintain sufficient affordable housing, displacement will remove those that most need and most use the adjacent transit service. What is defined as a “transit issue” is now inclusive of the effective provision of all municipal services, as transit does not operate in a vacuum. A political action committee dedicated to the broader policy environment, while crafting messages and strategies more inclusive of voters of color, is necessary.
- Reform transit agency CEO recruitment. Traditionally, transit operations experience has been a critical determinant in choosing a transit CEO. Today, however, the job has changed: It’s become more government affairs, community relations, and media-driven. The Black managerial class with those skills gets minted in MBA, law, and policy graduate programs with clear job pipelines after graduation. A mid-career professional from that pipeline is more than qualified for most transit agency CEO positions. However, the focus on prior operational experience puts these candidates at a distinct disadvantage, reducing the pool of applicants of color. Research shows that 60% of transit riders are of color. However, according to self-reported data from the American Public Transportation Association’s Transit CEO Committee, only 16% of CEOs are of color. The industry is missing out on people with personal experiences with the product and a political passion for justice.
Twenty-five years after realizing that racist drivers were using their cars as barriers against people like me, I can say that I am still treated differently, despite my best efforts. The difference between now and then is that I no longer feel alone. White allies are beginning to speak up and use their bodies to express their support for Black lives. (Researchers conducting preliminary demographic analysis of recent Black Lives Matter protests found that white demonstrators made up 61% of those surveyed in New York City, 65% in Washington, D.C., and 53% in Los Angeles.) It is clear that the national dialogue in the wake of the Floyd killing is not merely about state-sponsored police violence; there is a larger conversation about white supremacy and systemic racism underway. As a result, we have an opportunity to address the discriminatory systems endemic to our built environment, infrastructure investment decisions, organizations and industries. Our best shot to make progress on these challenges is right now.
Darnell Grisby is director of policy development and research at the American Public Transportation Association.
**
Kea Wilson, StreetsBlog, July 14, 2020, A Third of US Workers Want to Ditch Car Commute Altogether and Work from Home Every Day
COVID-19 all but killed the American car commute — and a new survey reveals that most U.S. workers don’t want to revive their morning crawls through endless gridlock if the pandemic recedes. A stunning 75 percent of American workers said they would ideally work from home at least one day a week after shutdown measures have ended and the pandemic is under control, the study found. And 32 percent of Americans said they’d prefer to ditch their commutes altogether and work from home every day.
Put another way: if that 32 percent of workers got its wish and went fully remote, it could remove as many as 48.1 million cars from American roadways every single workday (assuming all of those workers previously drove to work alone, and all of them secured one of the 37 percent of positions that can be done entirely from home). And that’s before you factor in workers who won the right to work from home for just part of the week.
That sort of vehicular subtraction would be one of the most intentionally transformative events towards ending traffic violence, decreasing the financial burden of car ownership, ending climate change, and ending the spread of disease in human history — second only to the unintentional transformations of COVID-19 quarantines themselves.
The robust appetite for telework is surprising many employers — especially considering until just a few months ago, the vast majority of U.S. workers had no experience with remote work at all.
Of the 151 million American workers surveyed as part of the 2018 American Community Survey, only 4.9 percent worked from home. Meanwhile, 86 percent of Americans drove to work every day — and only 9.1 percent of commuters chose to carpool with others.
But as COVID-19 quarantine orders have forced millions of employees out of office buildings and onto home laptops, some workers have found that forgoing daily traffic jams has added hours to their personal lives. The average American traveled 26.6 minutes to work each way in 2018 — time she ostensibly got back when her home office took the place of her cubicle. That helps explain why 78 percent of respondents said that working from home had saved them “a lot of time” during their day.
And hours behind the wheel weren’t the only ones workers reclaimed when they went remote. Fifty-seven percent of respondents did not report that they found it significantly harder to concentrate at home — a finding which supports another recent study of one large California company, which found that its employees were 47 percent more productive since they abandoned the office in March.
COVID-19 has shattered conventional notions of how many jobs truly require a daily in-person visit to a workplace, but there are still limits to the telework revolution. Some positions truly can’t translate to Slack and Zoom — or even if they can, stubborn employers may still not allow their workers to make the leap. When the survey was conducted in late June, just 22 percent of respondents were currently working from home, even though 70 percent of the survey group had jobs for which remote work was possible (or they were currently unemployed, but actively pursuing jobs that would allow them to skip daily traffic jams).
But the data suggest that employers and legislators would be wise to pay attention to what their workers want — both to help flatten the curve and to retain good employees long after the pandemic subsides. Most workers (59 percent) said they would be more likely to apply for a job where remote work was an option.
And if employers give the workers what they want, they won’t just improve staff morale. They’ll be a part of ending not one, but three pandemics: the COVID-19 outbreak, the global climate change catastrophe, and the traffic violence crisis that has plagued our planet since the advent of the car.
