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.”
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