Excellent input by transportation experts Robert Poole and Steve Polzin.
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Urban Transit After COVID-19
Here is a recent set of headlines from a couple of reputable sources,
to introduce a discussion of how urban transit will need to change when
we enter the post-pandemic period:
- “Remote Work Is Here to Stay. Manhattan May Never Be the Same,” Matthew Haag, The New York Times, March 29, 2021
- “If Rush Hour Dies, Does Mass Transit Die with It?” Henry Grabar, Slate, Feb. 11, 2021
- “Riders Are Abandoning Buses and Trains. That’s a Problem for Climate Change,” Somini Sengupta, et al., The New York Times, March 25, 2021
The reporters of these stories reflect genuine concerns, but my
impression is that many in the transportation community have not fully
thought through the implications for urban transit in the “after”
COVID-19 times.
One expert who has is Steve Polzin, a former transit official,
university professor, and most recently as a senior advisor for research
and technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation. After reading a
detailed paper that he and a colleague produced while at DOT last fall,
Reason Foundation commissioned Polzin to write a policy brief focusing
specifically on how transit will have to change, and why. The new
report, “Public Transportation Must Change after COVID-19,” was published last week and you can find it here.
Polzin first reminds us that in the five years prior to the
coronavirus pandemic, transit experienced a significant loss of
ridership, before appearing to stabilize at a lower level by 2019. Then
the pandemic led to former transit riders avoiding buses and rail
transit in favor of cars, bikes, walking, and working at home. Comparing
January 2020 (pre-pandemic) with January 2021, unlinked transit trips
were 65% less (though transit vehicle miles of service decreased only
23% for the same months).
Alas for those hoping for a post-pandemic return to “normal,” among
the factors leading to permanent changes are, of course, some degree of
permanent shifts to working from home, either part-time or full-time,
along with the continued popularity of network companies like Lyft and
Uber, a millennial generation that is getting older and buying houses in
the suburbs, and a general movement of people and companies from
higher-density to lower-density locations.
Polzin points out that even if many people work at home Mondays and
Fridays, but still work in the office mid-week, this will “make it
harder to justify peak capacity capital investments and complicate
service scheduling.” In terms of permanent work-at-home shifts, he notes
that if this share doubles from pre-pandemic levels of 5.7% to about
12% of people working from home, that could mean 15%-to-20% fewer
downtown workers, a major change for downtown-focused rail transit
systems.
Another section of the brief looks at declining vehicle occupancy by
transit mode: bus, light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail. All four
are down significantly, but some much more than others. And this makes a
surprising difference in the environmental friendliness of these modes.
Here is his comparison of pre-pandemic vs. December 2020 fuel economy
of various commuter modes, drawn from the U.S. Department of Energy
Alternative Fuels Data Center plus estimated occupancies from the
National Transit Database. The metric is passenger miles per gasoline
gallons equivalent; hence the highest numbers are best.
| Commuting Mode |
Pre-COVID |
Current |
| Heavy rail |
50.4 |
18.0 |
| Automobiles |
41.7 |
41.7* |
| Commuter rail |
39.6 |
10.9 |
| Light trucks/SUVs |
36.1 |
36.1* |
| Transit bus |
26.6 |
14.5 |
| Demand response (Uber, Lyft) |
9.2 |
9.2* |
*assumed to be unchanged
As of December 2020, the most fuel-efficient means of commuting was
the car, followed by light trucks—but only because occupancy embedded in
the transit calculations was so drastically low. Obviously, when we get
past the pandemic those figures should rise but whether mass transit
will be able to rebuild enough ridership to be more fuel-efficient (and
hence more carbon-friendly) remains to be seen, and as you can see from
the current numbers, transit has a long way to go.
A major premise of the Biden administration’s transportation agenda
is to greatly increase federal spending on transit, compared with only
modest, constrained increases for highways (with very little scope for
adding highway capacity). This approach poses major risks of putting
billions of taxpayer dollars into projects that will have costs far
greater than their benefits (e.g., light rail systems for medium-sized
cities, megaproject expansions of heavy rail and commuter rail systems,
etc.).
At the very least, it is premature at this juncture to commit funding
for major new rail transit projects before we have some idea of the
extent of transit ridership in the first several years after nationwide
vaccinations.
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