Jandos Rothstein
In York, Pennsylvania, Seanda Charles wakes up several hours before dawn to prepare for her daily trek to her job at a long-term care facility near Baltimore. The geriatric-care assistant relies on her daughter or a Lyft driver to drop her off for an express bus to the light-rail line that she takes into the city, where she catches another bus or a second rideshare to complete the two-hour-plus one-way journey.
In the best of times, Charles is an extreme commuter, regularly enduring one-way trips of an hour and a half or more. The coronavirus heralds the worst of times: In mid-March, as the pandemic tightened its grip on her south-central corner of the Keystone State, reduced transit schedules upped her commute to three hours.
Commuting is no longer routine for mass-transit-dependent, frontline health care workers like Charles, who have been slammed by the nationwide collapse of public transportation. Declining numbers of bus and rail passengers have meant service cuts, setting up a mass-transit roulette of changes that make life more difficult for people already putting their lives at risk every day.
Of the nearly three million essential workers in the United States who usually commute on transit, about 750,000, or more than a quarter of them, are health care workers, according to Mary Buchanan of TransitCenter, a national research and advocacy group based in New York. Of those workers, home health care aides, many of them low-income people of color, are some of the most transit-reliant people in the nation’s workforce; 55 percent of them do not have a car
Transit agencies have had varying degrees of success in adapting to the harsh realities of providing service to fewer numbers of riders, chiefly essential workers and others who rely on transit to get groceries and other necessities. In the Seattle area, the first epicenter of the health crisis, King County Metro discontinued fares and implemented rear-door boarding on buses early on to facilitate social distancing for passengers and operators.
Service cuts hamper people’s ability to get around, but some health care workers still patronize the available—and free—transit options, according to a survey of passengers during the pandemic conducted by Seattle’s Transportation Choices Coalition, a statewide policy advocacy group. King County Metro’s daily cleaning regimes may have reassured some passengers who might be fretful about such other options as ridesharing that rely on individual personal-hygiene practices. (Transit workers however, continue to criticize the Seattle-area agency for not taking stronger measures to protect employees’ health.)
Health care workers have emerged as a key transportation pressure group in their own right, forcing municipalities and transit authorities to bend once-inflexible policies to meet their crisis-driven needs. After worker complaints about having to pay high parking fees after long shifts in hospitals, Seattle finally instituted a special permit program and parking zone management plan that entitles hospital and human-services workers to free parking around hospitals and coronavirus testing locations for the duration of the emergency stay-at-home order.
After MBTA commuter rail service cuts made life difficult for early-morning-shift health care workers to get to their jobs in Boston—prompting complaints to Streetsblog Massachusetts—the authority reinstituted those services on several lines to suburbs north and west of Boston. In Houston, the Metro system had concluded that a fare-free system would increase costs, but then the pandemic persuaded the agency to temporarily eliminate fares, adopt rear-door boarding, and institute a shuttle service for the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest medical campus.
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SEIU 1199 United Healthcare Workers East, a leading health care workers union, succeeded in getting temporary Uber discounts for union members who work at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore. The Maryland/DC Division also worked with a District of Columbia retirement care facility, Ingleside at Rock Creek, to adjust the schedules of the care center’s drivers (who were no longer shuttling residents) to provide late-evening transportation for those workers who were spending upwards of two hours getting home after service cuts to local bus lines. And bikeshare companies in a number of cities, including Washington, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, have offered free rides and memberships for health care workers.
Not every segment of the health care workforce is benefiting from the new attentiveness to their needs during the pandemic. In Chicago, not only are transit passengers frustrated by erratic schedules, they also face life-threatening overcrowding at certain times of the day that’s contrary to the social-distancing guidelines that political leaders and public-health officials invoke in grave tones.
Transit agencies have had varying degrees of success in adapting to the harsh realities of providing service to fewer numbers of riders, chiefly essential workers and others who rely on transit to get groceries and other necessities.
George White, a home health care aide working for a private Chicago health care agency, travels an hour to 90 minutes one way on two Chicago Transit Authority bus routes to care for his client, an elderly man on the city’s South Side. White has an off-peak morning commute, so gets a seat to himself with people spread throughout the bus. Fighting the virus has produced one benefit for White: Buses that were ordinarily filthy are now regularly cleaned and disinfected.
On his way home in the early evening, however, White sometimes rides buses that are about three-quarters full. Passengers are wearing masks for the most part, he says, and are trying hard to social-distance themselves. But with seats roped off to help protect drivers, it’s tough. Moreover, with fares being collected, there’s none of the rear-door boarding that facilitates distancing.
To “practice the social distancing a bit better,” White would like to see more service, not less. “It’s hard to do that if there aren’t a lot of buses on the street, he says, adding, “It would also be good if there were some kind of container of hand sanitizer when you board the bus.”
Like many of the country’s large metro-area transportation networks, ridership on the largest—New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority—has dropped like a stone. That “implies that there are essential workers who [normally] ride transit who have shifted to some other mode, be it walking, biking, driving their own car, or ride-hailing,” says TransitCenter’s Ben Fried. “If every essential worker was staying on transit, we would expect the ridership drop to max out at 65 percent.” Instead, ridership on the MTA is off 80 percent. In normal times, there are about 840,000 essential workers taking transit in the city, with roughly 250,000 people working in the health care sector.
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However, the low-income neighborhoods where many health care and other essential workers live haven’t experienced those decreases. The New York Times reported that several subway lines that serve poorer areas have had smaller declines in ridership and remain crowded, making a mockery of social distancing. Low-income, bus-dependent neighborhoods in Boston are suffering from the same overcrowding problems.
The already emerging reports of the death of public transportation are greatly exaggerated.
“The fundamental tension that transit agencies are facing right now is between their workforce availability and providing safe conditions for riders,” says Fried. “There are steps that agencies should be taking to analyze where their vehicles are crowded and how they should be reallocating service so that it does protect the essential workforce.”
The already emerging reports of the death of public transportation are greatly exaggerated. Transit systems that acknowledged the concerns of health care workers, and developed programs to meet their needs in the face of the crisis, will be better placed to move into a post-corona world. Those systems that devise equitable provision of services for hospital campus–based workers as well as neighborhood-based home health care aides will do even better, especially if they incorporate their lessons learned into new offerings. As this menace subsides, climate crisis concerns will remind everyone that car travel is no substitute for better public transit that improves point-to-point connections. People in cities most definitely will come back.
Today, however, Charles, the geriatric-care assistant who commutes to Baltimore, continues to worry about her residents, co-workers, and family members. She takes all the requisite precautions: sanitizing and washing her hands and following proper protective-gear procedures. The one thing she doesn’t worry about anymore is a bone-wearying commute: It only takes Charles an hour to get to work now. Her mother, a retired transit worker, loaned her a car for the next month and perhaps a little longer.
“I’ll see what happens after that,” Charles says.
This post has been updated.
