If Congress breaks the legislative roadblock holding back the infrastructure bill, public transit will receive a windfall of about $39 billion. That will help keep things going, but the fundamental problem is that practically no one is riding.
Several people who have taken public transit recently told the Washington Examiner that they had had pleasant enough experiences and very few fellow passengers.
“I took Metro from Reagan National to the Huntington Station in late July during evening rush hour — only a handful of people in the car, and all masked. I survived,” Jeanie Truslow said.
Iain Murray buses into and out of D.C. a few days a week. “There are at most six people on it, normally two to three. I have developed a very friendly relationship with an afternoon bus driver, though. It’s normally an hour-plus ride, but thanks to fewer people and fewer stops, it’s down to 40 minutes or so. Some drivers ask you which stop you’re going to as you get on to save even more time,” he said.
Murray’s asthma presents some challenges when it comes to wearing a face mask for these trips. He said he thinks that the service is currently “a very large Uber pool, in effect, and it must be losing vast sums of money.”
Debbie Okeffe said that her family uses the “TriMet Portland [Oregon] bus system for all our transportation needs. You have to wear a mask and distance sitting. So far, we have not had problems. At our age, we don’t go out late.”
Steven Greenhut said, “I’m not a big transit rider, but I recently took the Mukilteo Ferry to Everett [Washington] and, to my surprise, it was immaculately clean, on time, and the staff were really friendly.”
On the expert front, Steven Polzin is a research professor at Arizona State’s TOMNET University Transportation Center and a former Department of Transportation analyst.
“Transit ridership remains significantly impacted and, given the COVID delta variant, recovery is likely to be set back and remain depressed for the near future. Numerous firms have postponed their return to office schedules. The transit impact is particularly significant in larger metro areas with concentrations of information workers in central business districts, areas that are often significant transit markets,” he told the Washington Examiner.
On the COVID-19 front, he added, “Growing survey evidence suggests both that telecommuting will remain substantial post-COVID and that many travelers will have residual fear of travel in crowded contexts that risk exposure to future health risks.”
“While COVID has absorbed the energy of the transit ridership discussion, growing urban crime and its perception and the nuisance/fear of homeless loitering are likely drag effects on transit ridership recovery in some urban markets,” he said.
One of those urban markets is the Chicago area, where Vox writer Gabby Birenbaum lives. She detailed how difficult it can be to get timely public transportation even in that relatively densely populated environment and said, “If you’re in Phoenix or Houston, the immense sprawl of those cities means that in almost every situation, it makes more sense to drive if you have access to a car.”
Birenbaum said she thinks the solution is to invest a heck of a lot more than $39 billion into transit systems. Still, with fewer riders for the foreseeable future, that investment may be hard to justify.
According to numbers from the National Transit Database, from 2015 to 2019, total monthly transit trips in America fluctuated between about 700 million and 950 million.
The last two years have seen a sharp falloff in public transit trips. They fell to about 500 million in March 2020 and have still not returned to even that low level since. The good news is that the numbers from April through June of this year are up from last year, but nowhere near historic norms.
June, the latest figure, had about 400 million transit trips, and Delta fears and closures could make that close to the high watermark of this year. This will likely generate further calls for subsidies from Congress, and more legroom for riders.
