Public Transit’s Pandemic Woes Persist

Six years after the COVID-19 pandemic left America’s buses and trains almost completely empty for months at a time, public transit agencies are still trying to understand the long-term social shifts brought on by the pandemic. More people work from home now than ever before. Downtown office districts are often empty on Mondays and Fridays. Homelessness and drug use are more visible in transit stations and vehicles than they used to be. Transit agencies, which have never earned enough revenue from riders to cover all their costs, are trying to find new ways to keep up with the bills. And state and local governments are hobbled by budget challenges of their own and divisions among members about how transit should be funded.

A pair of recent reports from the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, highlight the challenges transit is facing. Big-city agencies have drawn the most attention in the post-pandemic era, because they carry the most riders and face some of the most severe budget challenges. But the story is much the same all over the country. The Eno Center illustrates the challenges in eight mid-sized metropolitan areas in a series of charts and graphs.

In Portland, Ore., for example, the share of workers commuting by transit dropped from about 13 percent in 2019 to about 7 percent in 2024. Denver’s share dropped from about 8 percent to 3 percent in the same period. At the same time, the share of people working from home more than doubled in many cities. In Minneapolis it went from less than 10 percent in 2019 to more than 20 percent in 2024. In Charlotte it rose from 10 percent to 25 percent. Operating costs have gone up around the country, while fare prices have not kept up with inflation. And overall fare revenue, which never came close to covering all of transit agencies’ costs, now makes up an even smaller share of their budgets.


The ridership losses have been worse for some transit modes than others. Bus ridership has recovered more quickly and more fully than rail in many cases, with more than 80 percent of its pre-pandemic ridership in 2024. That’s partly because more essential workers ride the bus, and bus riders are less likely to have access to vehicles, says Grace Truslow, a policy analyst at the Eno Center who authored one of the reports. By contrast commuter rail, traditionally used by higher-income people traveling downtown from the suburbs for work, is still missing about a third of its pre-pandemic riders. Agencies have responded to these challenges in a variety of ways: Adjusting schedules to serve more weekend riders, promoting discounts for young people and families, launching campaigns to improve safety and cleanliness on transit. Many have cut service overall or adjusted the types of service they provide. Sacramento, for example, cut light rail service by 17 percent between 2019 and 2024, but expanded bus service by a similar amount. Minneapolis and Denver have made steep cuts to both bus and rail service. (San Diego opened a new trolley line in 2021, and as a result is offering substantially more rail service than before the pandemic.)


Transit agencies have had mixed luck trying to stabilize their budgets before pandemic-era federal aid runs out. New York’s transit system, which carries more riders every day than the next five biggest systems combined, was propped up by a payroll tax increase in 2023. Bay Area Rapid Transit in San Francisco, which used to get most of its revenue from fares, is hoping voters will approve a sales-tax increase this fall to prevent service cuts next year. Oregon voters recently rejected a measure that would have raised funds for transit, but it was also tied to a gas-tax increase to pay for a broader set of transportation projects — badly timed with the recent spike in gas prices.

“It’s a really, really, really bad time to promote a gas tax,” says Philip Plotch, a senior fellow at the Eno Center. “I don’t think anyone’s going to try that again for a while.”

The future of transit ridership will depend on a lot of broad social and economic factors, especially how cities develop and where people decide to live. States like California and Massachusetts have made efforts to promote denser development near transit stops, as a way of limiting sprawl while boosting transit ridership. The increase in remote work also gives people more options about where to live.

“There’s going to be a shift in this generation about where people are moving,” Plotch says. “As long as young people are flocking to cities, and right now they are, I think transit is going to do OK.”

Efforts to raise more money for transit work well when they’re supported by broad coalitions of organized labor, environmentalists, business groups, and other special interest groups, Plotch says. At the state level, urban-rural divisions can sometimes make transit funding more difficult, as is currently the case in Pennsylvania. But Plotch says agencies need to be open about the problems they’re facing with public officials at all levels, as well as interest groups and the general public, if they hope to stay relevant in the post-pandemic world.

“I think transparency is really important,” Plotch says. “Don’t sugarcoat the problem. You can build a coalition better if you say, ‘This is where we stand. This is the problem we have and we need your help.’”