Systems are surviving hybrid work schedules, but personal and fleet safety issues also influence the transit options that riders use—or desert.

Anthony Behar/Sipa USA via AP Images

Subway commuters exit through Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, April 20, 2022.

The data is in: Three days in the office is the hybridized work schedule that the Bay Area Council documents has become the new normal for white-collar workers in the San Francisco region.

The flight of remote workers has cratered ridership on major metro systems nationwide and is now the key variable affecting the provision of service, especially for older transit systems built to get workers in, out, and around city centers. Despite the returning tourist hordes and fun-seeking locals, and the service employees, eds and meds workers, and on-site white-collar workers still coming into work, revenues for fare-dollar-dependent systems are still well below their pre-COVID levels.

In this third summer of the pandemic, the American Public Transportation Association’s mid-February to April ridership data shows that transit ridership nationwide is at 60 to 65 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Bus networks are something of a bright spot; in urban areas, they show steady and encouraging ridership trends. Systems operators that equipped drivers and buses with robust COVID sanitary regimes saw riders coming back at a fairly steady clip once people ventured back out into the streets. Low-income people and people in neighborhoods of color continued to ride buses throughout the pandemic to get to jobs, shops, and medical appointments.

It’s the subway networks that have registered some of the biggest ridership declines. Social media from Washington to Boston and Chicago to San Francisco is overflowing with complaints about delays or crime—or both—that compromise systems’ ability to deliver on their core deliverable: safe, clean, reliable public transportation. American subway systems always had long lists of negatives: assaults, weird behaviors, delay-causing mechanical meltdowns, abundant filth, and more. But the pandemic crime surge has transformed the underground travel environment into a dangerous one.

In his analysis of the impact of remote work on transit, Phil Plotch, the Eno Center for Transportation’s principal researcher, argues that ridership may not return to pre-pandemic levels for at least another decade and observes that “perceptions about public safety are a serious challenge to increasing ridership.” Taking transit has long been a prime urban convenience—but today, transit takes more time and requires a higher tolerance for threats to personal safety.

“Prioritizing safety and service should not be [an] either/or; it should be both,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said on Monday after she peppered Federal Transit Administrator Nuria Fernandez with questions about the Boston transit system’s safety during a meeting of the Senate Banking Committee.

Some transit systems have only compounded their ridership woes with maintenance and fleet safety deficiencies. A series of catastrophic safety and maintenance failures prompted the Federal Transit Administration to take a closer look at Boston’s transit system when a man died after being caught in the door of a moving subway train in April.

In June, the FTA issued multiple directives for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to take immediate action to increase staffing at its operations control center, update its general safety procedures and certification issues, and perform long-delayed critical maintenance—all issues the predate the pandemic by decades. After trying to entice riders back with fare changes and other discounts, the MBTA had to cut weekday service levels to weekend frequencies, as it sought to comply with federal orders. Before the accident and major delays caused by complying with the federal directives, the subway’s weekday trips in March and April 2022 had averaged roughly 345,000, a significant improvement from the same two-month period last year and only slightly below 2021’s peak of 366,000 riders—though well below the 700,000 during the same period in pre-pandemic 2019. An FTA safety investigation report is due out in August.

The pandemic crime surge has transformed the underground travel environment into a dangerous one.

In the nation’s capital, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority bus ridership continues to far outpace its rail numbers after federal safety inspectors discovered major wheel and axle defects in its newest railcars. So far, WMATA has put eight trains back into service, in addition to putting even older railcars back on the tracks. Like the MBTA, WMATA has offered a menu of discounts and slightly improved frequencies to try to mollify riders. Some riders have switched to driving into the city; others continue to complain about wait times: “Put the 7000 [railcar] series back on the tracks and I’d take the risk and ride them,” one Reddit poster opined. “This current level of service is a**.”

New York magazine’s Reeves Wiedeman summed up the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s rail situation this way: “The subway is New York’s permacrisis.” In April, a shooter wounded people ten people on a train, a bloody rampage that shocked the city. A May 4 Quinnipiac University poll found that nearly 90 percent of New Yorkers want more police in the system. Mayor Eric Adams, who sailed into office on a law-and-order platform, has re-established the Train Patrol Force (the mayor, a former transit police officer, served on an earlier incarnation of the force) and has gone so far as to propose metal detectors for the system.

Transit ridership has nonetheless been on the upswing in New York, thanks to a strong showing in working-class neighborhoods whose residents cannot rely on Uber or impossibly long bus rides to get to their jobs. Overall, the MTA has reached about 60 percent of pre-pandemic levels. An analysis by the news outlet The City found that stations in Queens were at between 65 percent and 68 percent of pre-pandemic levels; stations in Midtown and Lower Manhattan are still struggling. Yet the current crime wave harks back to the lawlessness of the 1970s and 1980s, when many New Yorkers who could fled the city, and the subway’s annual ridership fell by more than 50 percent at many stations for nearly a decade.

Transit workers, who’d long faced assaults and death threats, saw those rates skyrocket during the pandemic. In March, 24 public-transportation unions spelled out their grievances in a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and FTA’s Fernandez. Providing thumbnail sketches of crimes perpetrated on their members in Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York, they demanded an immediate issuing of rules to protect transit workers (as already required under the FAST Act). They also demanded the implementation of the bipartisan infrastructure law’s safety provisions, which required the FTA to collect data on assaults, consult workers, institute measures to reduce risks, and update related national plans to recognize both assault and public-health issues.

Long endemic in transit, homelessness and fare evasion have spiraled during the pandemic. Most non-destination riders, as unhoused people are called in transit-speak, are nonthreatening. But where bus drivers can choose to let off people who erupt into screams when they want to get off between stops, on subways a frustrated, unhoused individual who needs an immediate out is effectively trapped with other riders who can’t offer help.

The federal government is comparatively quick to move on fleet safety issues. But the crime, homelessness, and mental-health problems on display underground seem to leave public officials at a loss. Local politicians invoke the need for more transit police, which does nothing to solve the deeper problems of urban—and often, underground—disorder. The shift to remote work has important revenue, real estate, and labor implications, to be sure. But those priorities too often take precedence over the ongoing degradation in the public-transportation experience for fare-paying passengers and transit workers in the here and now.

This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.

Prospect senior editor and award-winning journalist Gabrielle Gurley writes and edits work on states and cities, transportation and infrastructure, civil rights, and climate. Follow @gurleygg

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