The MTA’s Janno Lieber, CTA’s Dorval R. Carter, Jr., and BART’s Robert Powers explain the challenges they’ve faced.


COVID derailed America’s largest mass transit systems

Travel

COVID derailed America’s largest mass transit systems


changes. Yeah before Covid began the subway was 5.5 million customers a day. Busses were about 2.5 million and the commuter railroads were about 303 50 each. A ridership. Pre pandemic was about 1.5 million rides per week. Day. Pre pandemic part was carrying about 420,000 riders a day pandemic. Hit. You know in a matter of days we lost 90% of our ridership 90% almost 80%. About 90%. Mhm. Normally when a transit system has a budget gap, the way you address that budget gap is by raising fares raising fares really isn't the solution to this problem? Because that would just decrease right. Should be even more. What we're doing is we're decreasing fares were slashing the prices of all of our passes where reducing the prices of passes that connect up with our suburban bus service in our commuter rail operations. We're eliminating transfers, transfer fees. Uh So you can easily move from one bus to another without having to pay off for that. And all of this is intended to be part of an overall strategy to encourage more ridership thereby generate more revenue while making it easier to use the system. That's one of the reasons why the federal funding has been so important to us because it gives me a revenue source to support to support us. While we do this. Guess, Doctor Martin We're very much in support of you know and thankful for the monies and the federal support coming in from Washington D. C. um but that really is going to run out by the end of this next calendar year or soon in the calendar year, 23. Um, and you know, we've got to look at how we're going to do business in the future. We instituted this historic cleaning regimen where we literally cleaned every subway car every night that had never been attempted before. Remember we have, you know, seven or 8000 subway cars in our system. And, and on a given night, most of them or many of them are out on the road. We cleaned every car every night. We cleaned every station twice a day. We did provide masks, not just for our workforce, but for passengers through all of the subway booths, where the station clerks, it made those available hand sanitizer, but something the state of new york got very good at producing. We had our own industrial operation, uh, upstate and literally millions and millions of gallons of hand sanitizer were distributed to every mp a facility. We erected the plastic barriers for our bus drivers to be separated from passengers. We actually put up chains to block passengers from going through the front door where they would actually, you know, be passing by the bus driver and started doing rear door boarding, which meant that we weren't collecting fares. The good news is that, um, after some, a bit of wrestling with Washington, all of those pandemic related expenses, Washington has acknowledged ought to be covered by fema. I strongly and firmly believe that it's my job as the head of this agency to do everything in my power to give my employees the safest environment that I can. Um And that is both making sure that you as an employee gets vaccinated but that your coworkers also can feel comfortable that you know they are in danger when they're around you because you're not. And so the mandatory vaccination policy just made sense to me. So right now we're about 80% vaccinated, 20% unvaccinated. And so now we'll go sit with down with our labor partners you know and negotiate and have discussions about what the impact of that might be and uh you know and see where we go from there. But certainly um the operational concerns of you know losing folks uh to this uh is going to be something that we're going to have to keep our eye on. I am always worried about the potential disruption that a unvaccinated workforce may have. But I'm already having that disruption what the employees are getting sick every day because they're not vaccinated and recognizing that when they when they catch covid uh not only are they out of work for stanford period of time but if they've exposed any other employees uh here at C. T. A. They're out of work. Mhm. Mhm. By the middle of 2022 will be at about 50% pre covid ridership. You know, and to get to that, you know, uh pre covid level number. We think it's in the, you know, the 5 to 8 year range. We are now on the subways at about 55%. The busses are north of 60% greater, railroads are about 50% We're now up to about 700,000 trip today. So we're only about 50% of where we were in a pre pandemic when somebody is coming back into the office. Their first choice needs to be public transportation. So we need to be clean, we need to be safe, we need to be reliable and we need to be their first choice. The point is to make it as attractive, appealing as possible to use mass transit because that supports what new york is, which is a dynamic place based on density and human interaction and creativity. Uh And not just folks sitting in office parks or you know, even in their second bedroom tapping away public transportation is a reactive service to other things. And what I mean by that is our ridership will come back as people have places that they want to go there. Yeah,