Pandemic in the Metropolis

The COVID-19 crisis elevated the importance of private vehicles. The pandemic drove riders off public transit and spawned additional car-based activities such as drive-through testing and vaccinations and curbside pick-ups. Yet millions of low-income and non-white households do not own vehicles. This chapter draws on a unique credit panel dataset to examine automobile debt and delinquency in California. In particular, we examine whether automobile debt patterns during the pandemic differed from those during and coming out of the Great Recession (December 2007–June 2009). We also analyze the response to the COVID-19 recession across neighborhoods by income and race. Similar to the situation during the Great Recession, we find that the number of automobile loans per borrower declined. While the automobile debt burden (the ratio between total automobile debt and aggregate income) also declined, it fell far less during the pandemic than during the Great Recession. Moreover, automobile loan delinquencies spiked during the Great Recession but instead continued to drop during the pandemic. Finally, the COVID-19 crisis affected consumers differently by both race and income. Automobile debt burden rose in low-income, Latino/a, and Black neighborhoods, a pattern that preceded but continued unabated during the pandemic. The findings suggest that COVID-19 relief may have helped some families manage their automobile-related expenditures. However, other factors, such as increasing automobile prices, likely contributed to growing debt burdens, a potential source of financial distress.

More than half a million individuals experience homelessness every single night in the United States. The limited capacity of shelters to meet their needs is forcing many to turn to transit vehicles, bus stops, and transit stations for shelter. The pandemic only exacerbated the homelessness crisis. Fear of infection in shelters and reduced capacity due to physical distancing requirements drove more unhoused people to take shelter on the streets and also in transit settings. Although discussions in the popular media have raised awareness of homelessness in transit environments, the scale of the problem has not been well-documented in scholarly research. This chapter investigates the intersection of the pandemic, transit, and homelessness in U.S. cities, presenting the results of a survey of 115 transit operators on issues of homelessness on their systems, both before and during the coronavirus pandemic. We find that homelessness is broadly present across transit systems though mostly concentrated on larger transit systems and central hotspots, and it has worsened during the pandemic. The challenges of homelessness are deepening, and dedicated funding and staff are rare. Attempting to respond to the needs of homeless riders, some agencies have put forth innovative responses, including hubs of services, mobile outreach, discounted fares, and transportation to shelters.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly reduced the demand for ride-hailing services but saw a sharp increase in e-commerce, grocery, and restaurant delivery services. As the economy recovers and demand increases, several issues are emerging. The tension between companies that wish to keep drivers as independent contractors, but which hope that large enough numbers of them return to the industry, and drivers who increasingly demand to be considered as employees will likely lead to more attractive labor contracts, and perhaps even unionization in the future. Prices for ride-hailing and delivery services are increasing rapidly, rendering the savings relative to the now mostly defunct taxi industry and traditional package delivery industries near zero. While that will lead to a reduction in demand, no one knows how much that reduction will be and how long it will last. This chapter addresses three overarching themes dominating analyses of these industries. The first is labor, the second safety, and the third environmental impacts.

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically affected the ability of localities to pay for their transportation systems. We explore the effects of the pandemic on local option sales taxes (LOSTs), an increasingly common revenue source for transportation in California and across the U.S. LOSTs have many advantages over alternative finance instruments, including that they can raise prodigious amounts of revenue. However, LOSTs rely on consumer spending, which lags during times of economic weakness. This is precisely what we observed in California counties during the initial months of the pandemic. LOST revenues did recover after the initial economic shock of COVID-19, albeit to a lower level than they would likely have otherwise. LOST revenue trends during the pandemic were affected by national and regional economic conditions and government policy as well. This public health crisis illustrates both the pitfalls and resilience of LOSTs during economic downturns and recoveries. The lessons from the pandemic’s effects on LOSTs will be useful for policymakers and analysts in preparing for inevitable future crises and associated economic turbulence.

This chapter uses data from several sources, including health impact, mobility, and e-commerce transaction data to analyze shopping and mobility trends in the early months of the novel Coronavirus—COVID-19 pandemic. The analyses provide an overview of these trends in France, the UK, and the United States. The data, alongside a strategic review of other studies and sources, provide a picture of shopping and mobility during the pandemic. Shopping, and especially e-commerce, result in important, albeit difficult-to-predict transportation changes; thus, this chapter outlines a discussion of how the onset of the pandemic and the corresponding health restrictions might have impacted this relationship. We find that time spent at non-home locations decreased dramatically, while e-commerce transactions saw an increase. Immediately after public health restrictions were set in place, initial purchasing behaviors suggest some hoarding or stockpiling, followed by a clear increase in e-commerce transactions. Time spent at grocery locations decreased less than time spent at retail locations, which can be explained by the subsistence and maintenance nature of grocery shopping. Moreover, by June 2020, people in France and the United States were spending approximately the same amount of time in grocery locations as before the pandemic.

Following the first stay-at-home order in March 2020, many Californians responded with panic buying: they stocked up on masks, and hoarded toilet paper, hand sanitizer, canned food, bread, and pasta. Restaurants had to stop on-site dining services, and some even closed permanently. Californians adapted to the evolving restrictions imposed by the pandemic by switching to alternative channels for their groceries and experimenting with meal deliveries from participating restaurants. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on how Californians shopped for groceries and prepared meals before and during the pandemic based on a random survey of 1,026 Californians conducted at the end of May 2021. To better contextualize observed changes in California, we also investigated grocery and prepared meals purchases in China and South Korea, two countries at the forefront of online grocery shopping and meal deliveries that provide a window into possible alternative futures for e-grocery and meal deliveries in California. We conclude by reflecting on how our increasing dependence on online grocery shopping and meal deliveries may impact travel.

Restrictions on travel and in-person commercial activities in many countries (e.g., the United States, China, European countries, etc.) due to the global outbreak and rapid spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have severely impacted the global supply chain and subsequently affected freight transportation and logistics. This chapter summarizes the findings from the analysis of truck axle and weight data from existing highway detector infrastructure to investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on freight trucking activity. Three aspects of COVID-19 truck impacts were explored: drayage, long and short-haul movements, and payload characteristics. This analysis revealed disparate impacts of this pandemic on freight trucking activity because of local and foreign policies, supply chain bottlenecks, and the dynamic changes in consumer behavior. Due to the ongoing effects of COVID-19, it is not yet possible to distinguish between transient and long-term impacts on freight trucking activity. Nonetheless, a future expansion of the study area and the incorporation of other complementary data sources may provide further insights into the pandemic’s impacts on freight movement.

Historically, Southern California suffers from the worst traffic congestion and air quality levels in the country. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we observed a major reduction in economic and social activities within the region, leading to changes in roadway traffic and air pollution levels in a variety of ways. Within six weeks of the pandemic-induced lockdowns, freeway traffic volume dropped as low as 50%; however, it has since gradually increased back to pre-pandemic levels. The changes in freeway traffic volume have not been uniform across the Southern California region, and neighborhoods with different socio-economic profiles were affected differently. These disparities have brought up environmental justice concerns, particularly for disadvantaged communities that live adjacent to major roadways and warehouse centers. We monitored the changes in vehicle and human activities across communities in Southern California and explored correlations that are useful for developing various mitigation measures at both the local and regional levels. In this study, we go beyond regional analysis and examine the effects of the pandemic on traffic at a transportation corridor and local levels to examine possible equity issues. Results show that, in general, the level of traffic dropped less in disadvantaged neighborhoods during the pandemic. Further, traffic flow rebounded in these neighborhoods faster than in other communities.

In U.S. states, as in most of the world, mitigation of the spread of COVID-19 was implemented by cities, counties, and governors’ offices through “shelter-in-place” (SIP) and “stay-at-home” orders and related actions (e.g., closure of non-essential businesses). There were several important impacts of government SIP orders on traffic volumes, which in turn had impacts on fuel use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this chapter, I estimate GHG emissions and fuel tax revenue at the state and nation scales before, during, and after the SIP guidance. I find that due to approximately 50% reductions in estimated vehicle-miles traveled, U.S. GHG emissions that cause climate change were reduced by 4% in total and by 13% from transportation in the eight weeks after the SIP orders went into effect. This reduction put the United States on track to meet its annual goals for GHG reduction under the Paris Climate Accord. I also calculated that the rapid decline in travel resulted in savings of $5 billion/week to U.S. drivers and a loss of $0.7 billion/week in tax revenue to the states. These consequences should feature in future transportation and climate planning as important variables that may stochastically appear, and which are beyond the influence of transportation agencies.

This chapter describes the results of a short-term analysis of highway crashes in California during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has had an unexpected and abrupt influence on the demand for mobility. The effect of this was a drastic reduction in the level of activity on the roads. This level of activity defines the exposure of road users to crash risk and represents a focal variable in the sciences of traffic safety. The rapid rate of change in traffic that occurred during the pandemic, triggered a need to monitor highway safety at a higher frequency than what was previously common in traffic safety studies. We compiled data at the weekly level and analyzed six-week periods. Our analysis shows that the minor injury crash rate per 100 million vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) has gone down from 37.58 per 100 million VMT during the before period to 25.52 per 100 million VMT in the first period after the pandemic. This is a reduction of 32% in the minor injury crash rate per 100 million VMT. In contrast, the more severe and often catastrophic, major injury crash rate per 100 million VMT increased from 4.47 per 100 million VMT during the before period to 5.15 per 100 million VMT in the first period after the pandemic. This is an increase of 14.8% in the major injury crash rate per 100 million VMT. The resulting bifurcation across different crash severity levels indicates that although the overall crash rates dropped, the rate of catastrophic crashes (i.e., fatal and severe) got worse. The main implication of this finding is that a reduction in minor injury crashes does not necessarily correspond to a reduction in major crashes. These findings demonstrate that it is possible to reduce the overall crash rate without making the system safer in terms of fatal and severe crashes, and this should be considered when developing roadway safety programs.

This chapter examines the impact of the pandemic on walking and bicycling using three longitudinal samples of U.S. adults in the time of COVID-19. We use data from a unique longitudinal panel that was created as a combination of research projects conducted during 2018, 2019, and 2020 at the University of California, Davis. Data was collected in a sequence of four waves of data collection to better understand how active travel changed from early lockdown orders through lifts in travel restrictions. Bicycling in all three panels showed examples of an increase in the mode share for commuting at the start of the pandemic along with less of a decrease in the absolute number of trips with this mode, compared to other modes. Through person-level change and changes in mode share, walking showed an increase for non-work travel and daily physical activity during the spring of 2020. The analyses presented in this chapter show how some respondents initially turned to active travel during the early pandemic months, but that active travel generally waned later into the pandemic.

One of the major impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on society has been the massive adoption of telecommuting, and its related changes in travel choices. Using data collected in the greater Los Angeles region in the Fall 2020, this chapter examines the topic through the analysis of the changes in travel behavior among workers who adopted telecommuting in some capacity versus workers who did not telecommute during the pandemic. We analyze data from a cross-sectional survey conducted among 4,045 local residents to examine key sociodemographic characteristics of these two groups and their changes in travel behavior. We observe some major demographic differences between the telecommuting and non-telecommuting respondent groups, with non-telecommuters more likely to be non-white, younger, and with lower household income than telecommuters. At the time of the data collection, all groups reported lower average trip frequency across all travel modes and trip purposes, and reduced vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) as well. However, we observed high average monthly frequency of use of private vehicles and active travel modes for non-commute travel, in some cases indicating an increase from the previous year during the same period, as travelers avoided shared modes of travel during the pandemic.

This chapter examines changes in telecommuting and the resulting activity-travel behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on California. A geographical approach was taken to “zoom in” to the county level and to major regions in California and to “zoom out” to comparable states (New York, Texas, Florida). Nearly one-third of the domestic workforce worked from home during the pandemic, a rate almost six times higher than the pre-pandemic level. At least one member from 35% of U.S. households replaced in-person work with telework; these individuals tended to belong to higher income, White, and Asian households. Workplace visits have continued to remain below pre-pandemic levels, but visits to non-work locations initially declined but gradually increased over the first nine months of the pandemic. During this period, the total number of trips in all distance categories except long-distance travel decreased considerably. Among the selected states, California experienced a higher reduction in both work and non-workplace visits and the State’s urban counties had higher reductions in workplace visits than rural counties. The findings of this study provide insights to improve our understanding of the impact of telecommuting on travel behavior during the pandemic.

This research examines how bus use impacts the transmission of the COVID-19 virus in urban areas, focusing on the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in Los Angeles County. Using data from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority on station-level ridership in October 2019, April 2020, and October 2020, we impute station-level ridership for other months in our data and map these to 231 Countywide Statistical Areas (CSAs) in Los Angeles County, which are used by the Los Angeles Department of Public Health to report community COVID-19 transmission. We obtain CSA-specific COVID-19 case counts between March 16, 2020 and January 31, 2021 to create a monthly panel of bus ridership and COVID-19 cases. After using a dynamic panel regression, our findings provide no evidence that increased ridership levels or trip lengths are associated with higher incidence of COVID-19 at the CSA level in Los Angeles County in the period between June 2020 and January 2021.

During the COVID-19 outbreak, the risk of infection is not neglectable in a public transportation system. To satisfy the demands while controlling the spread of COVID-19, public transportation agencies have proposed various rules, such as increasing train frequency and requiring face coverings. In this chapter, we summarize newly developed evaluation methodologies, and evaluate the impacts of COVID-19 policies. We also present key findings regarding the impacts of different policies using these new methods. We find that the goal of stopping the pandemic coincided with minimizing the total delay when the service area was homogenous in infection rate. For heterogenous cities, minimizing the risk is equivalent to minimizing weighted travel time, where the weight is the infection rate. We also find that the results obtained from different models could be different due to their assumptions on the lost demand. If the demand is elastic, closing part of the system can prevent the spread of the pandemic, otherwise, closing will lead to longer waiting time, higher passenger density, and infection risk.

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.

During the pandemic, from March 2020 through March 2021, we monitored three San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies: two large—AC Transit and VTA; and one small—Tri Delta Transit. As the lockdown was imposed, white-collar commuters, students and older adults stopped using public transit. Initially, the ridership fell by 90%, and then for a year slowly climbed up to less than 50% for AC Transit and VTA, and to around 60% of the pre-pandemic numbers for Tri Delta Transit. This ridership recovery was not consistent. Local drops occurred during protests in June 2020, during fare reinstatements, and during the second COVID wave in Winter 2021. We found that the agencies’ response to the pandemic consisted of three parts: (1) maintaining health and safety of their employees; (2) minimizing transmission risk for riders by keeping buses clean and enabling social distancing through capping the number of bus passengers; and (3) changing their service. During the pandemic, we also observed a direct relationship between the socioeconomic level of population and transit ridership. More specifically, we observed higher ridership in low-income areas with a high percentage of Latino, Black and Asian population. These communities are populated by people, who generally rent their homes, do not have a car, but need to go to work, either because they belong to an essential workforce and/ or are undocumented immigrants who cannot afford staying jobless. On the other hand, in the wealthy neighborhoods of the Bay Area, transit activity all but disappeared.

The global tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic devastated communities and societies. The pandemic also upended public transit and shared mobility, causing declines in ridership, losses in revenue sources, and challenges in ensuring social equity. Despite ongoing uncertainty, guidance can instruct recovery and build a more resilient, socially equitable, and environmentally friendly transportation future. This chapter summarizes a recent scenario planning exercise conducted by the University of California Institute of Transportation Studies in collaboration with the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Executive Committee in Spring to Fall 2020. The exercise convened 36 transportation experts in the United States who developed policy actions and research options crafted to guide near- and long-term public transit and shared mobility. Clear themes emerged from the study regarding key actions for public transit operators in the areas of: (1) innovation and technology, (2) planning and operations, (3) customer focus, and (4) workforce development. A second grouping of broader policy strategies for both public transit and shared mobility included: (1) immediate policy and actions across actors, (2) alignment of societal objectives, (3) federal transportation spending authorization, and (4) finance and subsidies. While the exercise reiterated the need for rapid actions, thoughtful planning and decision-making can prepare both sectors for a more cooperative, multimodal ecosystem.

This concluding chapter presents a summary of the research findings in the previous chapters, along with some reflections for each of the five themes of the book and a discussion of necessary future responses (post-pandemic or in the event of a new pandemic) and topics that require further exploration. The pandemic brought into sharp relief pre-existing social disparities and affected vulnerable populations the most. The economic impacts of the pandemic were diverse and varied by geography, but again certain geographies and economic sectors were more buffered from negative outcomes than others. A lesson and a challenge for policymakers is to find ways to understand and reduce these disparities, instead of pushing them under the rug. The impacts on mobility and travel were dramatic as total trips decreased, transit usage fell dramatically, and telecommuting and active modes of transportation increased. Some positive impacts included an improved air quality, a reduced number of traffic crashes, and a proliferation of walking and biking in some neighbourhoods. As cities are slowly recovering from the pandemic, the challenge is to keep the positive impacts but also find ways to help the transit industry rebound from its plunge. Long-term impacts of the pandemic in terms of changing patterns of work and work arrangements, shopping, recreation, and other human activities that will affect travel need additional time and more research to discern.