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The chronically homeless are homeless because they can't affor a home, its because they need perminant medical care that only asylums provide and it's actively detremental to helping then to try and pretend solving the housing crisis will help then only to feign shock when the housing crisis being solved doesn't effect homelessness at all.

LAs transit population consists of many people who never stopped working during the pandemic, in addition to people who also cant afford to take anything else but transit. The large population of essential workers who use systems like LA Metro and MARTA as oppose to white-collar workers riding the T or BART explains a lot of the COVID numbers.

LA metro dropped fares for all of its busses for 22 months once covid hit. They also discounted fairs on the metro itself. In january of 2022 a day pass on the LA metro was $3.50. That would pretty reasonably explain its rapid rebound.

There's a riding in/around Edmonton that literally doubled in population since 2011, and I'm strongly considering trying to work for the government of Alberta so I can move there. I'm amazed by how much better it has handled the situation in the last few years and just about any other city in Canada.

Couple things - fare recovery is not something you should be proud about. It means that the governments not paying a whole lot to keep your system running, and if you lose all your commuters, BARTTTTTTTTTTTT - if your transit system is a radial parking lot dispacer, BARTTTTTTTTTT - if you charge fares so high that only office workers will afford it, BARTTTTTTTTTTTTTT - if your land use is terrible, BARTTTTTTTTTT - if your headways are low enough that riders have to check schedules, BARTTTTTTTTTTT - if all your train lines converge into a two track tube and terminate with only two platforms, you capacity is constrained and BARTTTTTTTT - when your regional subway is not integrated with local buses that dont exist, BARTTTTTTTTTTT and BARTTTTTTTTT simple. So seattle should not be copying SF

In LA transit has suffered mostly because it’s not safe, there are vagrants, junkies and Mentally Ill on all the trains and many of the busses.

8:26 fin.

This guys mental gymnastics is absurd.

TTC would be much higher if it didn’t suffer from a string of odd incidents (ie. mentally ill people acting a fool, being set on fire at Kipling station and being shot at Sherbourne station etc.). This has forced people to use GO instead. The numbers back it up, with GO now outperforming pre-pandemic numbers.

In Costa Rica we have a suburban or light train. I don't know about ridership numbers, but before the pandemic it passed every 30 minutes in both directions for most of the day and we haven't recovered that frequency and now it only goes from the suburbs to the city center in the morning and the other way in the afternoon.

The Boston metro is so dreadful. I had moved out in 2019, and I heard the service was bad in 2022, but I figured things would have gotten better by now. I visited for the first time a few weeks ago, and good lord, the Red Line is a mess

You guys make good videos

Wait, we’re only supposed to be “recovered?” Almost TO pre pandemic levels?? Not setting new ALL TIME monthly ridership levels every few months? Meanwhile Calgary Transit still won’t bring back four car trains. That apology in the beginning doesn’t cover ignoring a ridership that’s spiking higher than in a CENTURY.

Another reason for large ridership drop in some cities such as San Francisco, LA, Chicago and Boston, there has been a large exodus of low income residents, the group that traditionally depends on the transit system away from the city since pandemic

Only fell to 25% ridership, best of the lot! :*(

Yeah, a lot of the US cities that retained ridership seem like the ones that simply mostly ran from the minimal 'no other options' travellers to begin with. Probably also lots of 'essential' (retail) workers who had to keep commuting.

🇬🇧 I was working as a Nurse throughout the pandemic, and cycled the seven miles to the hospital and back every day, so none of this really made a difference to me, except that there was hardly any traffic on the roads, and the air was much cleaner, so there were some benefits afterall. Ask yourself this question though; How many people do you know who had all of their injections and boosters as instructed, but they still caught covid anyway? Do you ever think that we were not told the truth about the "vaccines"?

Politics truly matters. Miami was governed far differently than San Francisco

The majority of hotels in Miami were closed until June 1, 2020. Similar restrictions were enforced throughout the U.S. South. It’s a myth about early public health measures that it was otherwise. West Virginia later had one of the most successful vaccine rollouts. Political views rewrote history, mixed with truth. Florida did lift restrictions much sooner than elsewhere.

Vancouver's Skytrain says it all. And why Automated mass transit needs to be a thing everywhere ASAP... No labor costs means you can run service patterns that are much more tailored to demand without hurting anyone's bottom line... And they are strike proof. When Translink goes on strike, the Skytrain still runs normally because they have redundant backup staff to always take over if need be which rarely if ever happens... Except on older trains that are about to be retired I am told...

I was going to say that Canadians see Toronto as Canada's Detroit, but no that's Hamilton... I think Toronto is more like the New York of Canada, hated by those without and tolerated by those within

As an Angelina that’s absolutely correct, people who take the Metro generally have little choice

No PATCO or Baltimore Metro Subway?

There both dumps

San Diego LRT recovered so spectacularly that it was #1 in 2023 US LRT ridership despite being #5 in 2019. And 2024 ridership is set to break all time record highs.

It will be tough to get back to 100% as many transit riders belonged to disadvantaged individuals who suffered higher rates of Covid fatalities. That and some of those transit trips became bike trips instead, which isnt necesarilly a bad thing. Heres hoping those numbers continue to climb though.

Remote work is the most climate friendly thing humanity can do. Beats transit in every way possible. The pandemic was a blessing for humanity's future of work.

If you want to change the suburbs, then consider that the suburbs are trying to maintain their American Dream at any cost, which means that Conservatives have a far easier time in the Suburbs than urban places. Try to appeal to them that the American Dream isn't just a singular definition, but an idea that is an umbrella term for people's successes in the United States.

If you see the freedom to not be beholden to corporations, the government, and rich individuals as oppression. And yet see the oppression of said forces as freedom. I hate to say it, but you have fallen too deep into the rabbit hole and are gone too far to be saved.

Transit at the height of COVID would depend on how many were "essential" workers and if the subway served areas deemed "essential". New York for instance did shut parts of subway at night (allowing for maintenance) and provided replacement buses for essential workers at hospitals. Another variable is whether the subway serves universities or large high schools vs light rail/buses. When those education places went to home-studying, some cities would experience far higher drop in metro usage than cities whose educational instiututions not served by metro. b In Montréal for instance, all universities (except the George Williams campus of Concordia and McDonald College for McGill) are served by the metro so would have see huge drop of people at those stations. I do not know if supported by numbers, but my gut experience is that peak hours are not as bad and there is more even distribvutionof passengers during the day. There are also days of week with greater numbers for those who work at homd only a few days a week and gosub office 2 or 3 times a week. San Francisco's downtown is very tech heavy so would have see greater "work from home" trend than some downtown that has offices and shops, hospitals that require human presence. Note on Vancouver: driverless may means you have no staff on board, but they will have more staff in stations, and the more a train is used, the sooner it needs to go into maintenance shop for regular checks/maintenance and that requires workers. So it isn't a magical "doesn't cost to run trains". But it does allow degraded service (nobody in stations) with automated trains.

Also NIMBYs like Republicans live in their own world, so it's unlikely we can convince them to face reality.

Nice video, thanks!

Interestingly, London is a very commutery city, and yet the London Underground has made a roughly 90% recovery. Perhaps we haven't embraced the working from home culture as much as the U.S? I'm not really sure.

4:20 so in other words, it wasn't that LA's pandemic ridership was good, just that it's pre-pandemic ridership was terrible

la retaining the most ridership was crazy surprising but the reasoning makes sense, especially when you put it into the context of its initial ridership numbers

You never seem to run out of great video ideas

Notably, Vancouver has a single direction (AM inbound, PM outbound) commuter train service that has fared much worse than the rest of the system in terms of recovery. This supports the argument that serving a broader range of trips than just 9-5 commutes is one of the most important factors.

housing for me but not for you

Not mentioned: the perception of unsafety on US metro systems has also skyrocketed since 2020. This is also a consequence of staffing shortages among transit police, but also the deliberate policy decisions made in these cities related to crime. These things are steeped in politics, but it has a real effect on a lot of people’s transportation decisions.

I am simply surprised to know Chicago’s relatively lower public transit usage even before the pandemic. It was lower than Toronto’s and Montréal’s even though Chicago metro is bigger than Toronto and Montréal metros.

Pretty good rundown.

SoCal here; your analysis of LA’s Metro is pretty spot on. The subway system runs mostly through very dense, low-income immigrant neighborhoods where much of the population are “essential workers.” That helped keep ridership as high as it was during the pandemic. However, that drop from 2023 to 2024 can partly be attributed to perceptions of the system being unsafe which is keeping riders away.

Thanks for covering this! COVID and public health concerns are frequently left out of conversations about public transport accessibility. Many disabled and higher risk people, as well as people generally concerned about protecting their health haven’t been able to access public transport for years due to the lack of masks and clean air (great point about Vancouver being an open-air system). This is a huge equity issue because cars are expensive, and people don't own them in cities like NYC. As someone who works in public health, I'd love to see more public health and pandemic resilience being built into and added to public transit. Open air systems aren't a fit for all cities, but things every city can do is to provide air quality monitoring, install clean air infrastructure, provide free high quality masks to riders, increase bike lane infrastructure etc.

Very interesting. I expect Boston's subway would be struggling now anyway were it not for the pandemic due to the sheer number of maintenance issues faced there and if anything the pandemic may have given more opportunities to fix some of it.

Vancouver's Skytrain network needed to be expanded like a decade ago.

BART also suffered from dangerous situations on the trains as well as antiquated cars. They have now retired all of the original fleet, addressed crime and shortened the cars to eight. Ridership is coming back and I’m on cars that are frequently packed

3:04 Probably? That’s Canadian for definitely.😀

Couple notes as a Californian who lived in LA thru the Pandemic and who now lives in SF: LA: You are spot on about rider income, vast majority of people on the LA Metro do not have any other option to get to work and most of those people were essential workers during the pandemic(including myself). I just looked at my phone and saw a photo I took April 6 2020 of a crowded westbound Expo line train. Unfortunately this is a reason why LA's transit system is stuck in perpetual purgatory as the cultural & economic divide of people who use the system is even wider than pre pandemic. Which makes "recovery" so much more difficult. SF: The Bay Area is a complicated place, BART is basically a commuter system for suburban commuters to get to Downtown SF. SF invented the tech for WFH, housing prices were wildly inflated so people left or they don't come in anymore. I now work in downtown SF and rush hour ridership on BART into & our of downtown is coming back(only on a T,W,T scheudle, Mondays & Fridays are dead). Muni on the other hand(which is light rail and buses and only operates in SF) is has had a much stronger recovery and some bus routes that go outside downtown have higher ridership than pre pandemic. So its not all bad news but BART needs more money to survive. Not to mention BART had the highest farebox recovery rate of any Metro & loosing all that ridership is not good.

Tech industry. The tech industry realizes that almost none of their employees needs to be in a an office. Bart had a really successful partnership selling group passes for all the employees of a company to a company with headquarters in downtown. The company then provided that pass to the employees as a perk of the job. It meant a ton of ridership because that employee could get unlimited rides on weekdays or weekends to shows and museums on top of the daily commute rides. But no office means no commuter pass means the employees are paying for the pass themselves and that means no weekend or weekday rides to events. The theaters and symphony and opera and broadway are basically begging people to go to shows right now because no one has the commuter passes. And companies were paying really high prices for the commuter passes which individual employees are not willing to pay for one off trips. Plus stupid policies requiring bart to get a lot of funding from ridership and not taxes means it was overly depending on the commuters for sustainability. Basically, tax the companies to fund bart the way vancouver and DC do instead of doing the weird company commuter pass thing.

As a local Angeleno I am so ashamed of our transit system. It is so SLOW. In part because the distances are so long and we use light rail. At least they're trying to improve it by connecting UCLA to DT but the rest will still be lackluster