What are some trends of ridership on public transit systems in recent years?

Kari Watkins: Over the past approximately five years before COVID, we were seeing declines in both bus and rail in ways that we had not seen before and could not be attributed to things like population decreases or lower employment rates. We saw declines that could be largely attributed to the rideshare companies. Uber and Lyft were taking a pretty heavy toll on transit ridership.

In addition to this, before COVID, low gas prices were a factor. When gas prices go down, transit ridership is going to go down. And a little bit of increases in fares on transit systems was also hitting transit ridership.

And then COVID hit.

What happened during COVID was a lot of the people who rely on transit on a day-to-day basis – those critical workers, folks who were keeping our society going during the early parts of COVID – they still had to get to work. And many of those folks are bus riders as opposed to rail riders, because of the way we’ve set up these systems. And so we saw bus ridership decline, but it was still at significant portions of what it was before COVID.

Rail, on the other hand, was decimated, especially commuter rail.

Most commuter rail agencies are even still today nowhere close to what they were pre-COVID. In the early days of the pandemic, they were at 10% of the ridership levels that they once were.

We’re seeing some agencies, like Los Angeles Metro, where they’re predicting that in the next year or two, they’re going to be back up to the levels that they were pre-COVID. But there’s a lot of cities that have been permanently hit, such as San Francisco and New York.

Why are some transit agencies facing a ‘fiscal cliff’?

Kari Watkins: What happened during COVID was that many of these agencies were rescued through government programs where they got extra operating funds because the federal government and state governments knew that these agencies were going to be facing such dramatic declines in ridership that they wouldn’t be able to provide their services without some sort of extra support.

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