Transit Ridership Continues Slow Recovery

In a piece for Marketplace, Savannah Maher describes the slow return of public transit ridership, which remains sluggish despite high gas prices, which some agencies hoped “would nudge some of us onto city buses and trains and help transit ridership recover from the nosedive it took during the pandemic.”

With remote work still hugely popular, transit systems in tech hubs like San Francisco are still seeing low ridership numbers. In the case of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), ridership sits at 30 to 35 percent of pre-pandemic levels, when the system carried roughly 400,000 people across the Bay Area every weekday.

Some agencies have reduced or eliminated fares to lure riders back, but the future of fare-free transit programs hinges on uncertain funding sources. But while free fares or service changes may help bring riders back, the prevalence of remote work means that some changes in commuting patterns are likely here to stay, upending long-established models of service geared towards 9-to-5 commutes. Systems in cities with high numbers of remote workers will likely have to make some transformative changes to serve the needs of remaining riders and establish new funding models that rely less heavily on farebox revenue to fund operations.