Pandemic Transit: A National Look at the Shock, Adaptation, and Prospects for Recovery

While the COVID-19 pandemic in some way affected every person and enterprise on the planet, the temporary hollowing out of concentrated economic, political, and cultural agglomerations in cities dealt a devastating and potentially enduring blow to the public transit systems that depend on them for so many of their customers. This chapter draws on a survey of 72 U.S. public transit systems and semi-structured interviews with 12 transit agency staff, both conducted in the late summer and early fall of 2020, to consider how the pandemic shocked the transit industry at the outset, and how the industry adapted to deliver transit services. We find that: transit agencies adapted quickly, and many of their changes are now standard operating procedure; the pandemic tended to affect large and small transit agencies differently; transit’s role as a social service provider took on increased visibility and importance; and financial collapse has been averted, but funding shortfalls may become a pressing issue in the years ahead when federal emergency funding runs out. We conclude that while transit systems have adapted remarkably to dramatic change and that federal funding has largely forestalled fiscal crises, the longer term future of public transit in the U.S. remains very uncertain.