The COVID-19 pandemic had surprising effects on demand for public transit in American cities, new research suggests.
While demand for public transit dropped about 73% across the country after the pandemic hit, the reduction didn’t impact all cities equally, according to the study, which analyzed activity data from a widely used public transit navigation app.
Large, coastal cities – like Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, D.C – saw demand fall further than cities in the Midwest and South. The reason had to do with the nature of jobs in different cities and who was actually using public transportation before the pandemic, said Luyu Liu, lead author of the study and doctoral student in geography at The Ohio State University.
“Many of the people who used public transit in large, coastal cities could work remotely from home after the pandemic,” Liu said.
“But in cities in the Midwest and the deep South, most public transit users have jobs where they still had to come in to work during the pandemic and didn’t have any other choice.”
Study co-author Harvey Miller, professor of geography at Ohio State and Sustainbility Institute affiliated faculty, said what we have called “essential workers” during the pandemic are the core users of public transit in these cities often labeled as non-transit dependent.
“These are the health care workers, people working service jobs, working in grocery stores, people who clean and maintain buildings,” said Miller, who is also director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at Ohio State.
“It is a dramatic social equity story about who has to move during the pandemic.”
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