Phelan M. Ebenhack via AP
People ride escalators to exit the Metrorail system at the Dupont Circle station, May 19, 2023, in Washington.
The downtown Washington business district may be limping along, but the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is thriving. In the first quarter of 2023, WMATA’s ridership averaged 363,000 daily passengers—a nearly 70 percent increase over last year. That puts it in second place nationally behind New York, but outstripping the larger Chicago and Los Angeles systems.
These indicators are coming along just in time for everything to go sideways. The hundreds of billions in COVID-19 relief money that kept mass transit systems from collapsing is running out, and transit officials’ break from agonizing over how to plug another set of budget gaps, such as it was, is over. Their often-expressed plea “Without sufficient increases in revenue …” is definitely on the 2023 public-transit bingo card.
One corollary to the doomsayers’ death-of-cities proposition that permeated the early bad days of the pandemic was the public-transportation death spiral. The pandemic-induced ridership collapse produced deep fiscal hemorrhaging that a gargantuan federal relief program finally stopped. If there was an upside to fiscal chaos, it was that the crisis forced WMATA and other large urban transit systems to rethink and revamp their operations—and do it fast. They tossed out their pre-pandemic playbooks and designed new ways to respond to major shifts in the cultural zeitgeist of mass transit that also ended up addressing longtime passenger frustrations.
So, what has boosted Washington’s Metrorail ridership? Ladies and gentlemen, the weekend: In 2022, Washington recouped nearly all 91 percent of its pre-pandemic tourism. Between locals saying hello again to pre-pandemic traffic congestion levels and tourists persuaded that Metro is an attraction worth getting to know, weekend travel can look like the rush hours of the before times. Metro racked up impressive numbers during the spring Cherry Blossom Festival, the traditional kickoff to Washington’s tourist season, and for the first time in eight years, Fourth of July ridership was the highest since 2015.
The New York and Los Angeles transit systems have seen similar weekend ridership bumps; in L.A., weekend ridership is nearly back to normal. Before the pandemic, Boston’s commuter rail’s infrequent weekend service rendered it basically useless. Now, commuter rail weekend numbers are exceeding historical numbers in part because the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and Keolis, the commuter rail operator, tossed out traditional peak scheduling timetables in favor of simpler “clockface scheduling” that relies on train departures on the hour and the half hour. Who knew?
Hybrid work trends have wrecked the traditional Monday-through-Friday weekday rush hour. As passenger numbers sank like stones, transit operators came to understand that they cannot expect passengers to put up with the conditions that they tolerated before the pandemic. Today, large metro systems are seeing relatively higher volumes of travel not only on the weekend, but also midweek (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), courtesy of the hybrid schedules for those workers who have the flexibility to balance home office hours with in-person office demands.
Though spikes in ridership are good news, they are not enough to backfill fiscal shortfalls.
As the pandemic eased, aligning schedules to meet the demands of weekend crowds and hybrid-scheduled workers, and frequency of service, became the quality-of-service metric that matters. Nothing gets discussions going faster in the Washington, D.C., subreddit than comments about decreasing, or worse, increasing headways (the number of minutes between trains running in one direction on same route) on any given Metro line. As frequencies improve, so do perceptions of reliability, and willingness to ride. Cost was also a factor in quality-of-service considerations. Although a much-touted free-fare proposal went by the wayside due to its negative budget impacts, WMATA modified its distance-based fares and implemented a flat-rate fare for shorter distances along with a half-price fare program for low-income passengers. These issues are well within the control of transit system officials.
What big-city systems can’t really deal with as effectively are the increases in crime, from petty crimes like fare evasion up to and including murder—these quality-of-life issues are the product of wider social dysfunctions that transit systems cannot address on their own. (Arguing that “the vast majority” of people who commit serious crimes also evade fares, WMATA General Manager Randy Clarke has called for stepped-up fare evasion enforcement in Washington. The city has decriminalized fare evasion; Maryland and Virginia have not.)
Though spikes in ridership are good news, they are not enough to backfill fiscal shortfalls. WMATA faces a $750 million deficit in the next fiscal year, and no clear solutions have emerged beyond the prospect of deep service cuts. The authority has regained 75 percent of its pre-pandemic ridership, but overall revenues have declined. The system has taken further hits from its fare caps and the new low-income fare program. Addressing fare evasion costs WMATA about $40 million annually, and the new fare gates that it is counting on to help address that problem cost tens of millions more. Labor costs as well as other adjustments unique to WMATA, which relies on annual appropriations from Maryland, Virginia, and Congress, also factor into a difficult budget outlook.
With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, pleas to Congress for additional funding will go unanswered barring another COVID-type emergency, and maybe not even then. Metro areas that want robust transit systems will have to dig deeper into local and state revenues to preserve service, maintain trains, buses, stations, and system assets, and keep train operators, bus drivers, and other professionals on the job.
Still, where there are creative policymakers, there are shards of hope. New York devised a menu of funding fixes that avoided the bus and subway service cuts that would have made it nearly impossible to get anywhere or do anything in Gotham. But first, federal transportation officials finally came through with a sign-off on the city’s long-delayed congestion pricing plan.
Drivers coming into Manhattan from outside the city below 60th Street can expect to pay up to $23 to enter the city. Roughly 65 percent of respondents in a NY1/Siena College poll indicated that they would use public transportation rather than drive. Congestion pricing hasn’t been popular—a 2019 Quinnipiac poll found most respondents opposing the plan—but the new subway and commuter rail projects and upgrades funded by those billions in new revenues probably will be.
To walk the Metropolitan Transportation Authority back from its fiscal cliff, state lawmakers extracted more than $1 billion in new payroll taxes from the city’s largest employers, identified savings within the MTA, secured higher contributions from the city of New York, and incorporated more than $2 billion in potential casino licensing fees and revenues.
In California, state lawmakers came up with more than $1 billion from cap-and-trade funding and flexing billions in transit capital funding to go to operations for Northern California’s systems, Bay Area Rapid Transit, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and other regional transit agencies. In Chicago, the Chicago Sun-Times called on the Chicago Transit Authority and other metro area agencies to coordinate their budget asks from the city council, the Illinois legislature, and Washington. (As for Congress and the White House, see entries under “heavy lift.”) The paper also called for the elimination of a 50 percent fare box requirement across three of the area transit systems (in New York, the MTA fare box recovery ratio average across five divisions is 24 percent) and finding ways to provide more midday commuter trains.
Trillions in total COVID relief funding already spent, a divided Congress, and a fast-approaching election year drastically lower the odds for any additional federal funding for public transit. That equation forces public-transit systems and the jurisdictions they serve to dig deep to improvise homegrown income streams and other ways to stave off the cuts that would hurtle systems back into the nightmarish early-pandemic state of play and put a big dent in life in resurging urban centers. In other words, if New York and Albany figured out how to make the numbers work, then everyone else better get busy.
