On a sunny weekday midafternoon in Philadelphia, a SEPTA 21 bus trundled through the downtown shopping district traffic. Most riders on one of the city’s busiest lines wore masks, or at least had them on their chins. After the bus crossed the Walnut Street Bridge into West Philadelphia’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, new passengers came aboard, squeezing past seats plastered with social-distancing decals to stand, wedging themselves between others already crammed into the aisle. As they gingerly shifted positions, the driver began bypassing stops, leaving people on street corners to frown, yell, and curse. Sometimes bus riders heckle operators who strand customers. This day, nobody on the bus said a word.
On the bus and subway lines that connect the city’s neighborhoods of color with jobs and shopping in Center City, Pennsylvania’s largest employment center, ridership hasn’t decreased that much on buses like the 21, which serves a diverse ridership of essential employees, hospital and postal workers, some college students, and seniors hauling groceries during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the story of SEPTA’s 21 bus is far from American transit’s whole story. In the nation’s capital, most downtown office workers toil at home. Along the predominantly white Connecticut Avenue corridor of Northwest Washington, the few bus riders still board buses, where they find room to spare. Rush hour crowds no longer exist on Washington’s Metrorail Red Line, the system’s busiest prior to the pandemic. A rider is as likely to be the lone occupant of a subway car at 5:30 p.m. on a weekday as she is on an early Sunday morning.
BANNER
The crisis in public transportation is real, dire, and unprecedented. It’s no surprise, then, that since the onset of the pandemic, doomscrolling pundits have proclaimed the death of cities or its corollary: the demise of public transportation. These narratives recount the work-from-home transition of professionals, but miss the millions of other workers in cities or rural areas who have no such work-at-home options.
Across the country, transit systems have a mixed record in responding to the pandemic. Most operators have mastered the virus precautions, requiring masks, social distancing, and deep-cleaning and disinfecting. Some have coped better than others, though, in rethinking how to serve passengers who are no longer living in 9-to-5 worlds, and accepting the new realities about how to retain and secure funding at a time when Republican elected officials have blocked any federal response since last spring.
ABSENT THAT FUNDING most agencies have had to cut their services. A September American Public Transportation Association (APTA) survey of 128 transit agency members, including 25 of the largest U.S. transit agencies, found that the majority may close financial gaps by cutting back on service. Fully 80 percent of the largest transit agencies plan to reduce their service and/or pare back capital plans.
Cutting services, of course, means laying off employees like bus drivers. Bus drivers are expensive to train, and anyone who loses a job may not be as easily enticed back when systems need them. So, those layoffs carry long-term risks, says John Costa, the international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union. “Once the ballparks open up, concerts open up,” he adds, “there [will be a new] demand for that service. So what are you going to do” when the drivers aren’t there?
CARES Act funding provided the dollars to run buses and trains into the summer and fall. Agencies had access to $25 billion in public-transit operating and capital grant funding. As the end of the year approaches, however, this funding is slowly starting to run out. The agencies have sought an additional $32 billion in emergency funds to cover COVID-19 costs and revenue shortfalls. The $3.4 trillion HEROES Act that passed the House in May allotted nearly $16 billion for public-transit agencies, with $11.5 billion going to the largest metro areas and the balance to an emergency grant program. But Senate Republicans balked at the size of the package. After the election, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed openness to a new round of negotiations. But with the Kentuckian’s own proposal amounting to just a small fraction of the relief provided by the HEROES Act, getting a few billion more out of the Senate for transit is unlikely to happen.
How public-transit operators experience the crisis depends on their respective funding sources. The largest urban systems run on a combination of fare revenues, dedicated taxes, and often some local, state, or federal contribution. Jennie Granger, Pennsylvania’s deputy secretary for multimodal transportation, says that, overall, the state’s 52 transit agencies (including SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, and the Port Authority of Allegheny County, serving greater Pittsburgh) are stable through the end of the 2021 fiscal year in June, or, worst case, until the end of the calendar year. But the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh agencies have each seen about a 65 percent decrease in ridership between July and September compared to 2019. “Some of the bigger systems like SEPTA and the Port Authority depend upon how quickly ridership comes back,” Granger says, “and that’s a moving target.”
If there is no second stimulus, and ridership lags, Pennsylvania transit systems will have to take a closer look at business, labor, and fuel costs, along with service cuts and scaled-back operating hours, according to Granger. Transportation-based financing options such as congestion pricing, transportation network charges on ridesharing companies, and local revenue-raising opportunities are also under active consideration.
Cutting services means laying off employees like bus drivers, and anyone who loses a job may not be as easily enticed back when systems need them.
One system taking a fiscal gut punch is San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency. Like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, the SFMTA is heavily fare-dependent. Roughly 50 percent of its operating budget comes from fares, parking fees, and fines (the remainder comes from city and county general-fund transfers and operating grants), and some of those sources have dropped 80 to 90 percent.
Ridership in neighborhood commercial districts served by San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency is recovering, and bus lines that serve those areas have returned almost to pre-COVID levels. Ridership in and out of the central business district is another story. “Downtown financial areas are nearly empty and the commuter rail is nearly empty,” says Jeffrey Tumlin, SFMTA’s director of transportation. The number of riders has plummeted. “Without the fare revenue from those commuters, our whole financial structure collapses,” Tumlin says.
Tumlin wants Washington to come up with a new stimulus package. “If your fare revenue drops, and you’re no longer able to sustain certain levels of frequencies, so you cut frequency, then transit becomes progressively less attractive to anyone who has a choice of modes,” he says. “You end up in a spiral of endless service cuts to the point where all you’re left with is something so miserable that only people who literally have no other choice [use it]. And that’s the path we’re on right now unless the federal government issues another stimulus to help us survive.”
In July, SFMTA officials projected that the agency would “fall off a financial cliff in 2023.” However, Tumlin says that the agency’s “financial projections keep tracking along its worst-case scenario.” The authority’s CARES Act funding runs out in December, at which time it will dip into its reserves. It’s already shut down its light-rail system due to a combination of mechanical issues and employee health precautions early in the pandemic. Nor can the agency expect much help from the state of California, due to the state’s own fiscal emergency and the failure to partially repeal Proposition 13, which caps property taxes, in November’s election. “We will likely run out of money in 2022,” Tumlin says.
IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, Sound Transit is in an enviable position. Not only is the Seattle regional area system not experiencing the same degree of fiscal stress that most agencies are, it is actually in the midst of the country’s largest transit expansion projects, a $54 billion light-rail, commuter rail, express, and bus rapid transit extravaganza. In 2016, voters approved the expansion of the light-rail, commuter rail, bus rapid transit, and other advancements through increases in property, sales, and motor vehicle excise taxes in the Puget Sound’s King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties.
Sound Transit
Despite the pandemic, Sound Transit is moving ahead with expanding its Link light rail system. Here, a train nears Seattle's Mount Baker Station.
Overall, ridership dropped 87 percent during the pandemic. As in other systems, however, bus routes serving transit-dependent workers in communities of color did not drop off as sharply. CEO Peter Rogoff says his “biggest lift” is rescheduling capital expansion expenditures in response to an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion revenue shortfall. Most other transit district CEOs across the country have bigger lifts than his.
Back East, when the work-from-home option emptied out central business districts, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Agency, Ohio’s largest, cut service by about 15 percent. Gone were the downtown trolley and the park-and-ride options (which have been restored on a limited basis). Ridership dropped to as low as 30 to 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels, but it’s now up to about 65 percent on a good day.
Less brutalized by financial constraints than many of its peers (a local sales and use tax, fare revenue, federal contributions, and a modest state contribution fund the system), the GCRTA has used the pandemic lull to initiate a major service redesign. The agency conducted rider surveys, community meetings, and studies that devised two alternatives. One scenario would focus on providing service every 15 minutes every day including weekends, but only to areas with the greatest rider demand, such as suburban employment centers like Steelyard Commons and educational institutions like the Cuyahoga Community College, with the remainder only to certain transit-dependent areas.
The second alternative would allocate 50 percent of the budget to cover high-demand areas and 50 percent to low-demand areas, with every area getting less-frequent service. The benefits would accrue to people across the region who don’t have cars, can’t drive, or live in difficult-to-access areas that would see an existing route extended. “It becomes a conversation of frequency versus coverage,” says India Birdsong, the GCRTA general manager. “It’s no longer the case where your ridership is coming in at 8 a.m. in the morning, and everybody’s going back out at the end of the day,” she says. “Maybe we look at adjusting our bus network to be able to expand coverage, but at the same time, we’ve got to be frequent.”
Innovation is key, and frequency may be the barometer by which effective public transportation may be measured in the new normal. By reducing crowding, frequent transit would also alleviate some of the safety fears that will persist after mass distribution of a vaccine. Public transit will have to inspire confidence, and passengers are unlikely to tolerate the sardine-like conditions that they’d previously endured. Express buses, bus rapid transit, and the streetscapes that can accommodate these routes can alleviate crowding on buses, not to mention traffic congestion on heavily traveled lines.
The string of successful transit ballot initiatives on November 3 makes clear the strong confidence in the importance of public transportation.
Other concepts that have guided the provision of service—such as morning and evening rush hours—no longer fit how people work or travel, especially if a certain percentage of people never return to downtown office spaces, says Jim Aloisi, a former Massachusetts secretary of transportation who teaches transportation policy at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “The old idea of the rush hour approach to running transit is gone; it’s antiquated,” says Aloisi. “It was going away gradually before the pandemic because people weren’t all in the traditional 9-to-5 environment. But now it’s happening on an accelerated scale.”
RURAL RIDERSHIP DECLINES have not been as dramatic, in part because these routes serve some of the same transit-dependent, low-income people who, like those in cities, have no other options. In western Pennsylvania, ridership in the small towns of Warren, Crawford, and Butler decreased by 23 percent, 32 percent, and 28 percent, respectively. Granger, the Pennsylvania deputy secretary, says the state has seen smaller declines in rural areas partly because COVID-19 arrived later there and ridership numbers were not as high as in the larger transit agencies.
Bus and van systems fill a critical niche for small towns and tribal communities that are far from regional employment centers, health care, education hubs, and intercity transportation links like Greyhound and Amtrak. In addition to taking residents on errands and students to schools and colleges, they provide non-emergency medical transportation for dialysis and chemotherapy patients through contracts with local health care providers.
With 54 vehicles, Prairie Hills Transit, based in Spearfish in western South Dakota, is firmly embedded in the regional medical network, moving people to and from facilities run by Monument Health, the region’s largest health care provider, independent hospitals, and clinics. For Barb Cline, Prairie Hills Transit’s executive director, the pandemic has meant fewer non-emergency medical trips around the 16,500-square-mile service area that spans eight counties and 15 communities, including Rapid City.
COVID-19 arrived late to South Dakota, but the state has experienced one of the country’s fiercest outbreaks. Although schools remain open and people continue to shop and run errands, nursing homes are locking down and have scaled back residents’ trips to routine appointments. Prairie Hills Transit moved early to take up protective measures. They had ample supplies of PPE like masks and gloves. Cline had a team of two doctors and two nurses evaluate and advise them on their cleaning and disinfecting protocols. They required passengers to wear masks, installed plexiglass barriers for drivers, and used electrostatic sprays to clean and disinfect vehicles between trips, which is particularly important when transporting people who have tested positive for COVID-19.
While before the pandemic, the transit system ran 300 to 400 trips each day, from March to July, trips dropped to between 60 and 100 per day. In addition, the reduction in routine appointments for Medicaid recipients has cut into the payments the transit system receives for those trips. Despite those budget shocks, Cline has few worries for the next year or so. The system is primarily funded by state, federal, and local grants, fares, and donations. The agency also received $1.2 million in CARES Act funding. She is more concerned about COVID-19 and the health of her passengers and employees. “They weigh more heavily on me than the financial piece of it,” she says.
zz/John Nacion/STAR MAX/IPx
A sign in an MTA subway car, September 2020
More than anything else, the string of successful transit ballot initiatives that passed in urban areas and small towns on November 3 makes clear the strong confidence in the importance of public transportation that exists in many localities. Missoula, Montana, voters gave the city’s Mountain Line bus service a $3 million boost through an increase in mill (property) levies. Riders there will gain Sunday service for the first time ever, more frequent buses, increased funding for zero-fare rides, and eventually an all-new electric fleet. The changes are set to debut in 2022.
Seattle voters approved a six-year renewal of their sales tax to fund King County Metro bus routes, maintenance, and capital improvements, and low-income fare programs for seniors, students, essential workers, and low-income riders. Austin green-lighted two proposals, a $7 billion Project Connect transit expansion plan for two light-rail lines, a commuter rail line, bus rapid transit, and a bicycle-pedestrian improvement plan. San Antonio passed a measure to fund improvements to its VIA Metropolitan Transit system beginning in 2026. APTA has reported that 32 out of 34 transportation ballot questions nationwide passed since January.
IN GENTRIFYING METRO areas like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., workers pushed out to suburban towns in their search for affordable housing are even more transit-dependent than they were before—unless they work from home. How workers across the nation will assess the pros and cons of working from home once the pandemic is over has become a crucial determinant in shaping the future of public transportation. A June Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research study found that 42 percent of employees work from home, and 26 percent are going to physical locations to work, while 33 percent are not working.
But, the Stanford study also concluded, only half of the people who work from home can do their tasks as productively as they could when they commuted to work. Some may not have adequate internet connectivity or IT support, or work in a bedroom or another less-than-ideal workspace, a situation the Stanford researchers labeled a “ticking inequality time bomb.” They concluded that working two days per week at home may emerge as the optimal compromise.
In metro Seattle, tech giants aren’t expecting all employees to permanently cocoon in home offices. Indeed, they’re making real estate purchases to house new groups of workers. In June, Amazon announced a new 111,000-square-foot office space for 600 web workers in Redmond, Washington, even after COVID-19 hit Washington state early and hard. Microsoft plans to expand its Redmond campus, and local businesses have expressed concerns about the company’s recent announcement that would allow employees either to work from home, return to offices, or even relocate.
“I don’t know that we as a nation are going to stay at home,” says Rogoff of Sound Transit, who served as federal transit administrator and undersecretary of transportation for policy during the Obama administration. “For all the talk of telecommuting, I’m seeing that Microsoft is not slowing their multibillion-dollar expansion of their campus out in Redmond. Facebook just in the last few months has contracted for enough space for 7,000 employees,” he told The American Prospect. “There’s going to be a desire to get employees back to a workplace, if not every day, with some frequency.”
Perhaps the biggest vote of confidence in the return of physical workplaces comes courtesy of New York, the perennial subject of death-of-cities and demise-of-transit gloom. The New York Times reported that since the pandemic began, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google have acquired more than three million square feet of office space in the city. If a worker actually wants to get somewhere in New York, buses and subway are the smartest options.
The fate of public transit also affects the fate of the planet. In the United States, transportation is the key producer of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change, and cars and other light vehicles are the primary sources of those emissions. If anything, the pandemic gave the Earth a short breather. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that CO2 emissions from the transportation sector plummeted 40 percent in the first half of 2020, and overall emissions declined 8.8 percent, more than during World War II, the Great Recession of 2008, or the oil crisis of 1979. As people adapt to a post-pandemic new normal, whether traffic congestion and climate change dangers exceed pre-pandemic parameters may hinge on whether public-transportation systems can switch gears and restore confidence that buses and trains are safe, clean, and more efficient than driving.
On the fiscal front, Republican members of Congress appear content to let transit and other COVID-ravaged sectors languish. The perennial inability of Congress to act indicates that states and local communities increasingly will have to find their own way to pay for transit, though they will never have the sums at their disposal that the federal government can muster.
But as necessary as a new stimulus package is, it’s only a short-term fix. The prospects for longer-term federal funding are even bleaker. Public transportation can’t rely on the federal gas tax boost to fill the coffers of a Highway Trust Fund that is well on its way to insolvency. Besides, raising the gas tax would take political courage that few in Washington possess, even though it could provide a short-term bridge to the electrification revolution and new mechanisms such as congestion pricing.
If he can persuade Congress to join him, Joe Biden could be the first American president since Dwight Eisenhower established the interstate highway system to have the opportunity to reshape how Americans move. Biden has likely spent more time as a public-transportation commuter, relying on skilled Amtrak workers to get him from home to work and back again, than any of his presidential predecessors. Rogoff notes that during his tenure at the Transportation Department, Biden was engaged in making sure that Great Recession stimulus funds got to communities like Detroit struggling with transit problems.
“The guy used to burn me a new eardrum when he talked about Amtrak funding,” Rogoff says. “It’s not an amorphous thing for him, he’s really quite committed to it.” If Biden can translate his enthusiasm into federal dollars and concrete reforms, not only will public transportation survive the pandemic, but the millions of Americans who use it will thrive.
This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.
