As pandemic wanes, subway cars remain half-empty
 

As pandemic wanes, subway cars remain half-empty

Daniel de Vise
The Hill
01/02/23

This week, New York subway officials grabbed a woman passing the turnstiles at the 161st St.-Yankee Stadium station and announced she had won a prize for being their billionth passenger of 2022.

That sounds like a lot of passengers, until you consider that the New York City Subway carried 1.7 billion riders in pre-pandemic 2019.

Ordinary life has returned to many urban restaurants, taverns and sidewalks, especially on evenings and weekends. But the nation’s great subways have not fully rebounded from the ghost-train dystopia of COVID-19.

Ridership in 2020 plunged 60 percent, to 640 million, on the nation’s busiest subway system, the smallest number to ride New York subways in more than a century. In other words, between 2019 and 2020, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority lost a billion passengers. Most of them haven’t returned.

The nation’s second- and third-busiest subway systems, in Chicago and Washington, D.C., are faring even worse.

Fall ridership is running at about half of 2019 numbers on Chicago’s “L,” which logged 87 million passengers through October. Washington’s Metro carried roughly 225,000 daily passengers through October, two-fifths of its 2019 ridership.

The obvious reason for half-empty subways is remote work. The share of people working primarily from home tripled from 6 percent in 2019 to 18 percent in 2021, according to Census data.

Virtual workers abound in big cities. Nearly half of D.C. workers now toil mostly at home.

Getting teleworkers back on subways is a big problem for transit officials.

. . . .

As large cities struggle to lure back subway riders, smaller rapid transit systems around the nation seem to be recovering more successfully. Nationwide, the pandemic-era diorama of empty buses and vacant transit hubs has largely passed.

Public ridership nationwide, including buses and trains, plummeted to 20 percent of pre-pandemic levels in April 2020, according to a report from the American Public Transportation Association. Ridership rebounded to around 40 percent of normal in the summer of 2020. The arrival of COVID-19 vaccines pushed national ridership near 60 percent of 2019 levels by late 2021, and to 70 percent today.

Public transit use runs higher in smaller cities, where remote work is less common and ridership was lower to begin with. Bus systems have recovered lost riders more quickly than train lines.

The relative success of bus routes speaks to subtle socioeconomic differences between bus and train customers. Bus lines “generally serve more essential workers, while rail modes serve more office commuters,” the report states. Amid the pandemic, “rail riders have been more likely to have options to work from home.”

Yes, transit ridership is down nationally, but it's rising, and was above 70% of pre-pandemic ridership as of 2Q 2022. And it has risen every quarter, so probably more in the 75% range now. Disappointing, but headed in the right direction.

Off peak and weekend travel is basically 100%+ of pre-pandemic travel, so the obvious issue is changed work patterns.

Looking at the APTA numbers, it does appear Washington Metro is underperforming, but it makes sense given the economic base. And Washington Metro has always been a more hybrid metro-suburban rail system, focused on getting suburban professionals to their downtown workplaces (the same demographic most likely to WFH).

I think looking at year-to-year comparisons is of limited value. We were still contending with the Omnicron COVID variant in early 2022. As noted above, I think it is more useful to look at trends for each quarter.

Yeah, the quarterly trends provide the most value, IMO. First half of 2022 was definitely affected by Covid, and many hybrid and return-to-office policies weren't yet implemented. Many aren't implemented even now.

It's really the suburban-focused systems with more affluent demographic which are most affected. Tellingly, most bus systems, with fewer choice riders and a lot of working class without WFH options, have almost normal ridership.

Looking at the APTA numbers, it appears the Bay Area ridership was most hard hit, which makes sense to me, given the affluent, tech-focused demographics.

https://www.apta.com/wp-content/uplo...rship-APTA.pdf

Right. At this point, ridership is basically an inverse relationship to the percentage of workers working remotely in a region. The lower the percentage of ridership relative to pre-pandemic, the higher percentage of remote workers, and vice versa. It has nothing to do with quality and/or safety/cleanliness of the public transit infrastructure nor the willingness of the residents to ride public transit.

I predict in most if not all of the more corporate urban areas, ridership will never reach pre-pandemic levels. Remote work, either hybrid or full, is now seen as a way for employees to lure or retain talent.

This may be my Dewey Defeats Truman moment but I firmly believe the "wfh is the future and transit will never recover" is the post-9/11 "we will never build tall buildings again".

I wouldn't put it as "wfh is the future". It's more that wfh is an incentive that companies have been and will continue to use for the foreseeable future to hire employees, at least in areas that are tech heavy.

We already know that most tech companies are at most 3 days a week. Some are full remote. And it's not just tech companies either.

Overall, the ridership numbers reflect these missing bodies.

And many workers are already unhappy with having to go into the office 3 days a week. If companies eventually try to push for full time office work, I think there will be significant pushback, and companies are eventually going to relent to the desires of their employees, for fear of losing them to competitors.

It would probably take a significant event, like a recession or depression to place the power back into employers hands, and even then, some have already committed to full remote.

I believe transit numbers will eventually fully recover, even if we accept heavy hybrid and increased 100% remote workplaces. Transit is mobility, and I think relative mobility will recover, even if the share of work trips is permanently lower. Also, it's still too early to understand long-term workplace trends, or even if Covid just accelerated what would have happened anyways.

A lot of transit agencies are simply holding their breath that all the commuters will return while ignoring that people want to ride rail systems mid-day, nights, and weekends.

Some of them could be far more recovered if they didn't have terminal commuter brain. Next up is service cuts when they've torched through the last of the Federal COVID money, probably starting with busses which are actually full.

my spouse works one of the biggest tech companies in the city and the office days remain firmly at zero. she likes to go in some days to basically have a city block sized building to herself. only some of the related agencies with young people voluntarily come in on wednesdays just because they want to. so otherwise there is no push to get back to the offices at all so far. in fact just the opposite they keep giving them days off.

of course not everyone works these kinds of wfh-able jobs, but i am thinking transit is seriously going to be affected as are the so-called doom loop of office dependent and related businesses for quite awhile. :shrug:

I feel bad for the twenty -somethings stuck working at home . So antisocial and alienating

yeah actually so does my spouse. she was happy to see them coming back in one day a week on their own. she just wfh that day when she doesnt want the bother.

the funny thing is, its the uppermost management folks that havent come back at all (although the very top has). unlike the young people they have huge suburban home offices lol.

This is why I continue to hope the WeWorks of the world can give those folks an option "X' if they work remotely. The WeWorks here in Chicago tend to be more quiet. Not sure that's a reflection of every US WeWork.

However, at every WeWork I've been to in Europe (London, Paris, Milan), they were always hopping with people working remotely out of the common space area. It was actually fun to go in and work from there, socialize with people you don't even work with technically. When I was in Milan, I made a regular WeWork friend who was an American ex-pat working in Italy.

If you could get that replicated at WeWorks (or other co-working spaces in the US), I bet tons of people would go in and use them at least a couple days a week just to get out of the house and have an excuse to get downtown.

Then again - I'm a 30-something single person..... so I have a biased perspective on these issues.

Remote working is lame. It's all of the people who can't socialize *really* not socializing.

Cool story, bro.

I've heard this argument before but truthfully, it doesn't hold much water. It reads more like, I don't like it, therefore it's lame, and I'm going to make up a half baked reason why it's lame to justify to others why I don't like it.

Preferring to work remotely has no bearing whatsoever on a person's social aptitude.

Person A can prefer to work remotely due to the flexibility it provides, while still enjoying socializing with their coworkers either remotely or in office or on off sites.

Person B might prefer to work in the office, but actually hates all their coworkers and never goes out to any after work events.

Which person is actually anti social?

I do think, for a certain age cohort, it must be odd and isolating to be permanent WFH. In my post-college years, almost all my socializing and relationships came via work. Granted, this can still happen via remote work, but the socialization patterns were disrupted. Obviously people aren't going to be having dinner, drinks or activities together on a whim when they're all in different locations.

There's also stuff like this going on along with junkies shooting up, smoking, and defecating on the trains and platforms:

https://www.fox29.com/news/video-man...obbery-suspect

Philly and DC (and I am sure others, but I am most familiar with these systems) need to focus on the crime on/around mass transit if they want to see ridership increase and at a quicker pace.

Meh - I agree with this to a small degree. My first job out of college lasted four years, and it was a small office of people, which means socialization wasn't really a big thing for me there. It forced me to become much more social outside of work in Minneapolis, which ultimately is a good thing. I don't see why people rely on work to make friends/lovers. It's better to do that outside of work because eventually you will change jobs.