Work at home impact on transit

[NorthShore]

Seattle has the largest percentage of work from home employees in the country. The trend has impacted economic recovery in many cities, but perhaps most significantly transit.

Most strikingly, they found the remote work trend came mostly at the expense of public transit. Ridership on buses and trains declined more than twice as fast as car travel in response to remote work.

The new census figures show this for Seattle. As remote work more than quadrupled here since prepandemic, the share of workers who commute alone in cars has dropped about 21%. But those taking public transit plummeted 36%.

The researchers concluded that transit agencies “need to adapt” to have more noncommuting trips that are less peak-focused, mirroring the all-day flexibility of the new work environment. If remote work starts to increase again, it may call into question the planned expansion of expensive, fixed-guideway transit systems such as light rail.

Perhaps there is some hope.

“For cities, this will mean increasingly moving from a place of work to a place of leisure and consumption,” he writes. The key to that, he says, is “good public infrastructure, and improved services like education and police. To attract residents, shoppers, and diners, cities must provide appealing services and control crime.”

I, certainly, found this to be the case coming out of the pandemic in Chicago. The highest ridership seemed, initially, to be on weekends when people were coming downtown (either from the suburbs and outlying areas or our of town tourists.). However, these were also the safety challenges both on transit and downtown, which have evolved some things in perception (and some reality) such as who will come downtown and what audiences for arts organizations look like.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattl...its-effects/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-android

 

[railiner]

“Most strikingly, they found the remote work trend came mostly at the expense of public transit. Ridership on buses and trains declined more than twice as fast as car travel in response to remote work”


This surprises me. I believe the demographics of those riding transit include more of those in occupations that can’t work from home…