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Originally Posted by SunDevil
I wonder how much remote working/working from home has contributed. If people can work remotely even 3 days a week that creates a lot less demand for transit services, if they were previously using them.
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Not much. In San Diego at least the percentage of people working from home has held at 6-7% for years. And that's high in national terms, Carlsbad has the highest percentage of anywhere in the US at 15%.
Also Uber/Lyft are practically a nonfactor. Rideshare makes up 0.6% of communes and is in the low single digits of total trips.
What's really happening is that the booming economy is making it more feasible for people to afford a car. Public transit, walking/biking, and even carpooling are all decreasing as more and more lower income folks get on the road. And it's hard to argue, even in NYC a person has potential access to more jobs if they commute via car than via public transit.
Contributing are public transit agencies' increasing obsession with rail, LRT, subways, and other non-bus infrastructure. The issue being that these systems are typically routed through high income areas, where people are already rich enough to afford cars, while low income areas where the people actually need public transit are left behind. Rail based ridership is up at historic levels, but it's been more than washed out by the massive decreases in bus ridership.