Matt Rourke/AP Photo
U.S. drivers recently reached a major milestone when the number of daily passenger vehicle trips reached pre-pandemic levels for the first time in a year.
Pre-pandemic ideas about who travels, when, and where are being discarded faster than the time it takes to breeze through a toll plaza with an E-ZPass. The great post-COVID-19 sort-out of the transportation needs and demands of workers and employers has forced a long-overdue re-evaluation of everything from bus and subway schedules to congestion pricing.
Right now, commuting to work is still in stasis. COVID-19 accelerated telework and working from home (WFH) trends—two trends that likely staved off the wider economic collapse that would have followed if businesses put millions more people out on the streets. But the navel-gazing about working from home and the new and future habits of a well-educated, predominantly white professional class has steered conversations about mobility into strange territories: Cities are dead! Mass transit, who cares! No more traffic jams! These predictions failed to take into consideration factors that are now playing out as the pandemic wanes and people surge into the streets.
Most essential workers in certain retail sectors, transportation, health care, and the like have had to be on-site. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the share of Americans who teleworked or worked from home peaked at 35 percent last May. Since then, the percentages have steadily declined through the first quarter of 2021. In January, 23 percent of workers teleworked or worked from home; in May, a bare 16.6 percent of employed people did.
Nonetheless, the commuting debate in the post-pandemic era zeroes in on the WFH habits that have dented public-transit ridership. Smaller-city, suburban, and rural bus transit systems did not experience as sharp a decline in ridership as some of the largest urban transit systems. Kansas City saw less of an overall ridership decline than New York. But even in New York, bus ridership stabilized after the first few months of the pandemic, in part due to public perceptions that aboveground travel was safer than underground commuting in stale air (even though public transportation has been largely ruled out as a major factor in the spread of the virus). Although long maligned, once safety precautions were in place and schedules stabilized, bus networks and the drivers that powered them proved to be dependable for pandemic commuters.
However, “increasingly we disinvest in bus operations, which means less reliable service and less frequent service,” says Anne Brown, a Mineta Transportation Institute research associate and University of Oregon assistant professor, who studies transportation equity. “There is often a lack of political will to do things like reallocate the street space from car parking to bus lanes, which would make a dramatic improvement in how our buses operate—and that would be across cities.”
The pandemic forced a long-overdue reckoning about rush-hour service and the reliability and frequency of off-peak offerings. Neighborhoods of color benefited from these examinations: Pandemic commuting patterns showed which routes would work better with greater frequencies, and which ones needed a redesign, or service with smaller vehicles, or outright elimination. With much of the WFH cohort (and the peak-travel options geared to masses of people flowing into city centers) likely out of the picture for the foreseeable future, and other workers juggling shifts that are anything but nine-to-five, transit systems are moving toward providing better service during non-rush-hour periods.
This summer in Washington, where suburban commuter subway ridership has nose-dived but also where city residents and tourists are beginning to return, service hours will return to near pre-pandemic levels with improved off-peak frequencies on rail (and on buses). Rail fares, which are distance-based, will drop to a flat $2.00 on weekends. Cleveland expedited a major redesign of its bus network during the pandemic lull to increase frequencies from urban centers, where many riders live, to the major job centers located in the suburbs.
The debate over free or reduced fares boils down to a simple question: Can a transit system afford to offer them without new subsidies? Los Angeles has embarked on the country’s most ambitious pilot to provide free fares to low-income riders and students. But L.A. is unique in that Metro operations rely less on fares and more on taxes for their revenues. In cities like Boston, although a June MassINC poll of registered voters showed strong support for reduced fares systemwide and for low-income riders, fare revenues comprise roughly a third the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority operations budget. In New York, fare revenue provides 50 percent of the operations budget for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
BANNER
In the country’s seven largest public-transit commuting areas—Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington—2019 census data shows that transit riders are roughly split between low-income and middle- and upper-income riders, with 23.5 percent of riders earning $100,000 or more.
If roughly one quarter of workers opt out of transit because they work from home and have a car (or cars), what does that mean for traffic congestion? Though transit ridership nationwide has only returned to 50 percent of pre-pandemic levels, some of the increased traffic in certain areas can be chalked up to drivers who used to take transit returning to their cars. People now working from home drive to do some of the errands that they used to do on foot downtown. Transit riders’ bad memories about bus or rail reliability in places (like Boston) where delay-causing maintenance issues have been problematic for years may keep commuters in their cars.
After two years at the top of the pack as the most congested city in the nation, Boston fell to fourth place on INRIX’s 2020 Global Traffic Scorecard for the United States (New York is number one). A MassINC Polling Group survey found that 32 percent of registered voters thought that traffic would be worse than before the pandemic. Boston Twitter complaints bear out that frustration, and there are renewed calls from advocacy groups like Transportation for Massachusetts to revisit congestion pricing.
Some businesses must decide if they plan to continue special transportation services for a workforce that may be mostly remote. Google set up a Via2G microtransit (similar to Uber’s Express Pool) to help reduce traffic congestion between its Sunnyvale and Mountain View, California, campuses. Employees used an app to request a free ride anywhere in specified residential areas in a ten-mile radius during the morning and afternoon rush hours. The program ended during the pandemic. (Google has since announced that 20 percent of employees can continue to work from home.) Brown, the Mineta Transportation Institute researcher, evaluated the pilot and says that employees “appreciate the cost savings” and that Google expressed hopes to continue the program.
Commuting constitutes the smallest share of trips that Americans take, but how one gets to work has an outsized impact on how people live. While older workers and women with child care responsibilities often prefer WFH environments, the verdict is mixed for younger workers. Millennials’ preferences for urban communities, ambivalence about car ownership, and interest in the climate benefits of transit may have the strongest impact on post-pandemic commuting trends.
Expanded possibilities for camaraderie, networking, and after-work socializing in vibrant neighborhoods may persuade young people that commuting is not so bad after all. A December 2020 Pew Research Center survey of pandemic work habits noted that 42 percent of people aged 18 to 49 who worked from home had difficulties getting motivated to do their work, compared to 20 percent of older workers. In its April survey of work-from-home attitudes, the youth research firm YPulse found that most millennials want the ongoing flexibility of remote work. Yet a more striking finding, unchanged from 2020, is this: In 2021, 41 percent of millennials looked forward to going back to their offices.
This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.
