During the pandemic, we also observed a direct relationship between the socioeconomic level of population and transit ridership. 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.
Local drops occurred during protests in June 2020, during fare reinstatements, and during the second COVID wave in Winter 2021. This ridership recovery was not consistent. 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.
As the lockdown was imposed, white-collar commuters, students and older adults stopped using public transit. During 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.
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