![]() ![]() Tech companies like Twitter are downsizing and Etsy shuttered its San Francisco doors altogether. Los Angeles' web of subways and light rails is regularly moving more people than BART for the first time since the Federal Transit Administration started collecting detailed ridership data 20 years ago.Įven as the public health crisis loosens its grip on daily life, downtown San Francisco has one of the lowest office occupancy rates in the nation. ![]() ![]() The collapse in transit focused around downtown San Francisco is so dramatic that Los Angeles' web of subways and light rails, which is smaller and notoriously lacks an LAX airport connection, is now regularly moving more people than BART for the first time since the Federal Transit Administration started collecting monthly ridership data 20 years ago. "The share of trips on BART that began or ended at the four downtown San Francisco stations was going up every year. Taylor of UCLA said the wide disparity is because Bay Area transit ridership was so heavily skewed toward commuters heading into buzzing San Francisco office buildings. That is 80 percent higher than 157 million rides lost among Los Angeles County's main transit operators. Across the Bay Area's seven largest rail and bus agencies - including Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit and VTA - riders took 283 million fewer transit rides in 2021 versus 2019. Besides his office shifting to remote work, Lanham did not want to risk spreading a COVID-19 infection to his newborn child. "I went two years without riding BART," said Lanham, who has returned in recent months to riding rail twice a week. As of June 2022, Los Angeles County has recovered 71 percent of its ridership compared to 55 percent in the Bay Area.īay Area office workers like Stephen Lanham are behind one of the nation's worst ridership recoveries as techies, lawyers and financial analysts left transit for the safety of their cars and to work from home.Īfter years of being a daily BART user, Lanham, an engineer, said goodbye to hopping on trains with strangers when pandemic lockdowns kicked in. Instead, it's a story of two hobbled transit systems clawing back their pre-pandemic riders at vastly different rates. Angelenos did not suddenly ditch their cars for the metro. The driving force behind the Bay Area and L.A.'s current ridership fortunes is not a flourishing mass transit system in Los Angeles. "What happened in the pandemic is the whole script flipped," said Brian Taylor, a transportation expert at UCLA.īay Area's Nation-Leading Ridership Downturn But in 2021, Los Angeles racked up over 83 million more transit trips than the Bay Area - a staggering threefold reversal, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis of federal data for the two regions' largest transit agencies. County, which is over a third larger by population. How big was the turnaround? In 2019, transit riders in six Bay Area counties took 43 million more trips than L.A. And even when accounting for the Bay Area's far smaller population, L.A.'s per-capita transit ridership temporarily surpassed its Northern California neighbor for the first time in at least two decades. now has more people riding buses, light rails and trains than the Bay Area. (TNS) - When Los Angeles shuttered its last streetcar in 1963, the Bay Area was already planting the seeds of BART, the expansive rail system that embodies a common refrain in the longstanding competition between Southern and Northern California: Angelenos are gas-guzzlers stuck in parking-lot traffic, while the Bay Area has built an enviable transit network.īut over the past two and a half years, the Bay Area's claim to California's mass transit throne has been deeply eroded, if not undone. ![]()
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