The COVID-19 pandemic upended transit use, finance, and management. To investigate these effects two years into the pandemic, we conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with senior managers at transit agencies in the most populous U.S. state, California. We found that the pandemic generated many operational and managerial challenges for transit agencies. Ridership plummeted, then slowly recovered, but is still well below pre-pandemic levels at most agencies. Commuter trips to and from major job centers were especially slow to return. In response to decreased demand, public health concerns, and uncertain finances, many agencies cut services and spending early on. As a result, fare revenues declined, in some cases precipitously. However, federal pandemic relief funds proved essential in filling budgetary gaps, stabilizing finances, preventing layoffs, and maintaining services. Other transit subsidies mostly bounced back robustly. Our interviews suggest that, though California transit agencies experimented with free fares, few fareless programs were made permanent. Their challenges include considerable uncertainty associated with future travel demand, looming financial shortfalls at systems that formerly had high farebox recovery and are still drawing on federal pandemic funds to backfill their fare revenue losses, and protracted labor shortages of drivers and mechanics that are preventing many systems from providing desired levels of service.
Terra Incognita: California Transit Agency Perspectives on Demand, Service, and Finance in the Age of COVID-19
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
2023-08-08
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Das Hinterland ist Terra Incognita
IuD Bahn | 2006
|INTERSTELLAR COLONIZATION - Terra Incognita: Cosmological Theory and Space Colonization
Online Contents | 2002
|Die Verordnung (EG) Nr. 261/2004 : noch immer eine terra incognita
Online Contents | 2012
|Piloting Low-Cost Transit Service Enhancements through Agency Collaboration
Transportation Research Record | 2014
|Standardization: Historic Perspectives on Modern California Light Rail Transit Systems
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1995
|