Monitoring of Bus Transit in Bay Area During COVID-19

Abstract

AbstractDuring the pandemic, from March 2020 through March 2021, we monitored three San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies: two large—AC Transit and VTA; and one small—Tri Delta Transit. As the lockdown was imposed, white-collar commuters, students and older adults stopped using public transit. Initially, the ridership fell by 90%, and then for a year slowly climbed up to less than 50% for AC Transit and VTA, and to around 60% of the pre-pandemic numbers for Tri Delta Transit. This ridership recovery was not consistent. Local drops occurred during protests in June 2020, during fare reinstatements, and during the second COVID wave in Winter 2021. We found that the agencies’ response to the pandemic consisted of three parts: (1) maintaining health and safety of their employees; (2) minimizing transmission risk for riders by keeping buses clean and enabling social distancing through capping the number of bus passengers; and (3) changing their service. During the pandemic, we also observed a direct relationship between the socioeconomic level of population and transit ridership. More specifically, we observed higher ridership in low-income areas with a high percentage of Latino, Black and Asian population. These communities are populated by people, who generally rent their homes, do not have a car, but need to go to work, either because they belong to an essential workforce and/ or are undocumented immigrants who cannot afford staying jobless. On the other hand, in the wealthy neighborhoods of the Bay Area, transit activity all but disappeared.