Abstract

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health and transit agency officials recommended that people drastically curtail their interactions with others to slow the spread of illness. On public transit, where strangers congregate on large vehicles and travel together, the decline in riders was especially dramatic. While walking, biking, and driving, which enable social distancing, substantially recovered in 2021 to pre-pandemic levels, transit use remained – and remains – depressed. But transit use neither fell nor recovered uniformly over the course of the pandemic. While ridership declined in most places, it did so unevenly across neighborhoods and users. Our research suggests that in the early part of the pandemic, transit use declined more dramatically among higher-income people, who were more likely than lower-wage workers to work from home. Because people who owned automobiles could travel about without coming in close contact with strangers, and because vehicle access is positively related to income, those who rode transit early in the pandemic were more likely to be low-income, Black, Hispanic, and immigrants than pre-pandemic transit riders.With many workers still working from home, at least part-time, it is not clear when – or whether – transit trips into and out of major office centers will recover to their former levels. If that is the case, transit demand and service will likely continue to center around lower-income neighborhoods.