With commuters staying at home, transportation companies are trying to reinvent themselves
Rush hour traffic is now anything but at the Montgomery Street station in the heart of San Francisco.
Gone are the workers lugging laptops who crowd in trains under the towering offices of lucrative tech companies. At 5:30 p.m. on a recent weekday, a woman dragging large shopping bags with three young girls easily secured several rows of seats.
Three years after the pandemic began, remote work remains a way of life for many office workers, and few major transportation systems in the United States have suffered as much as Bay Area Rapid Transit. The 131-mile network relies heavily on suburban residents commuting to San Francisco daily and less than other transit systems on local passengers trying to get through the city.
Weekday passenger numbers on BART are down to 32 percent of what they were before the pandemic began, marking a desperate moment for San Francisco. With no daily foot traffic, major retailers are leaving downtown and analysts believe the downtown core has yet to bottom out. Homeless encampments and open drug use have further discouraged visitors, while passengers have complained about security and a lack of cleanliness.
BART officials are beginning to come to terms with a future that no longer revolves around an inner-city work culture. They are considering whether to run to serve more concertgoers and sports fans at night and on weekends.
In the United States, the transportation systems that have relied on office workers for decades are struggling to avoid financial collapse while commuters stay at home. Many systems are asking their local governments for bailouts as federal pandemic aid dries up, but they are also scrambling to reinvent themselves.
Kansas City, Albuquerque And Boston have experimented with eliminating tariffs. Dallas offers subsidized Uber rides to public transit users. The Washington subway is investing in housing and shops at dozens of stations.
“If someone says they know a way out of this difficult situation, they’re kidding themselves,” said Brian D. Taylor, the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “This is a really challenging time.”
In the San Francisco area, BART was established half a century ago to ease congestion as more commuters moved to the city for work. Before the pandemic, the system was so popular that trains were often overcrowded. There was talk of spending $15 billion to build a second underwater tunnel to transport even more rail travelers into downtown San Francisco.
But the riders who packed BART trains have, too turned out to be a fault in a post-Covid world where tech workers and other professionals have stayed at home.
BART has some of the lowest public transportation fares in the country compared to pre-pandemic levels, according to data from the American Public Transportation Association. Other California agencies are outperforming BART’s 32 percent — the San Francisco-focused Muni line is at 58 percent, the Los Angeles bus and train system is also at 58 percent, and the AC Transit bus system, based in Oakland, is operating at 54 percent capacity. New York City’s subway and bus network sits at 72 percent.
Alejandra Alvarez, 65, has been commuting on BART from Richmond, an East Bay suburb, to San Francisco to work the front desk at a doctor’s office for two decades, and has seen rush hour passenger numbers decline in recent years. Once, she said, a man tried to snatch her iPhone from her hands. Another time, a woman undressed in the train carriage.
“There are days like that, and there are days when things are smooth sailing,” said Ms. Alvarez, as she waited behind the yellow platform line one recent evening to catch her BART train home. “And it’s less crowded now, which is kind of nice.”
BART and other carriers lose revenue for every empty seat or row during rush hour. Bus and rail systems depend on billions of dollars in federal Covid relief funds to keep operating, but the money is expected to run out within a few years, transportation chiefs say.
In California, after pleading for help, the state legislature last week agreed to provide $1.1 billion over three years to avoid harsh cuts to public transportation. State lawmakers also decided to redirect $2 billion from transit infrastructure to day-to-day operations — a sign that once-optimistic expansion dreams are giving way to survival needs. Governor Gavin Newsom, who had initially proposed cutting transit funds to reduce the $32 billion budget deficit, has yet to approve the budget proposals.
In the Bay Area, saving BART is also about saving San Francisco. City leaders fear public transport cuts will further discourage office workers and tourists, making recovery even more difficult create a “doom loop”.
BART is about to get a significant portion of the state funding approved by the legislature. Robert Powers, BART’s general manager, said he also hoped changes, such as shifting train schedules to serve more leisure travelers, would buy the system time until it could find new funding or commuters return.
“We believe the downtown economies in the Bay Area will recover,” Mr. Powers said. “We are firmly convinced of that and we will be ready. We will be there for the riders.”
Other carriers are experimenting with incentives and services. Next month, the Metro in Los Angeles will let passengers ride for free afterwards pay a certain amount every day or week.
Denver’s offer free travel on its bus and rail system in July and August. The SEPTA system in Philadelphia sells heavily discounted monthly transit passes to employers, including Wawa convenience stores and Penn Medicine, to discourage employees from driving.
In Seattle, kids have been able to do that travel on public transport for free since last fall, an effort to cultivate the next generation of public transit users, said Dow Constantine, King County’s county executive. The county also offers a free transit pass to anyone who sees a hockey or basketball game at the Climate Pledge Arena in downtown Seattle.
Mr Constantine said he wanted efforts to rebuild ridership “in what I think is a permanently changed environment.”
Large-scale changes that would increase public transportation use — more development near stations, congestion pricing, or restrictions on parking in cities — are generally not within the purview of transit companies, said Ethan Elkind, a professor of environmental law at the University of California , Berkeley, who wrote a book on the history of the Los Angeles subway system.
“You can put the New York City subway in the middle of Oklahoma and have no rider — that’s kind of the harsh reality for American transportation,” Mr. Elkind said. “There’s only so much they can do with service and rates to lure riders back.”
In many cities, riders may only need to go to the office on Wednesdays. Or they want to pick up their kids from school or run to the supermarket in the middle of the day.
The Dallas Area Rapid Transit, which operates buses and trains in the metropolitan area of Dallas-Fort Worth, unveiled a new bus network last year that scrapped several lesser-used routes, including some that had been in operation since World War II. DART has also increased the frequency of its more popular routes to make bus transportation easier for spontaneous trips.
The Dallas agency has partnered with Uber to offer discounted rides to customers that help them reach destinations where buses and trains can’t reach. For $6, riders can purchase a day pass that covers the cost of train, bus and Uber rides, said Gordon Shattles, a spokesperson for the agency.
“The only thing we couldn’t move was the rails,” Mr. Shattles said.