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While the COVID-19 pandemic caused ridership on public transit and shared mobility to drop precipitously and put severe strain on their finances and operations, all was far from well prior to the pandemic. Transit ridership had dropped across the state in the half-decade prior to the pandemic, despite increasing public investment, and the relationship between shared mobility and regulators was oft-disputed. Thus, looking during and beyond the recovery from the pandemic, this project seeks to answer the question: what is and should be the future role and structure of public transit and public shared mobility in California?

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This project reports on the recent past, present, and immediate future of public transit finance in California and Southern California in light of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the financial situation of transit operators in the state and the region appeared dire, with plummeting ridership and fares and rising subsidies and operating costs. However, the three enormous federal pandemic relief bills brought billions of dollars to California transit agencies and helped them weather the fiscal storm, until many of the state and local tax revenue sources on which the state’s transit agencies rely bounced back and more quickly than most forecasters initially predicted. Yet in 2023, many of the state’s transit systems are struggling operationally and financially. Ridership began eroding in the half-decade leading up to 2020. While the federal pandemic relief bills provided a critical lifeline to keep struggling transit systems afloat early on, these funds are running out. Meanwhile, operating costs have risen, ridership and fare revenues have only partially returned, and some transit systems face “fiscal cliffs,” where they will need substantial new infusions of funding, substantial cuts in costs and service, or some combination of the two. Against this backdrop, this project examines the current state of California transit finance: why ridership and fare revenues are down and their prospects for recovery; what lessons the successful federal relief bills provide; why commuter-oriented systems are struggling financially much more than those that primarily service transit-reliant riders; and what the financial managers at transit systems have done to cope with this turbulent time and how they see their future financial prospects.

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Growing public interest in fare-free transit demands an assessment of fare-free and/or reduced transit fare programs, particularly how these programs may benefit disadvantaged communities, both urban and rural. Fare policy equity entials decisions about the similarities and differences in treatment afforded to various constituent groups. It also involves decisions about the extent to which travelers are expected to pay for the costs of serving their travel demand. This is of particular concern with regard to low-income, largely non-White, travelers, who are both disproportionately likely to use transit and to be burdened by the monetary costs of transit use. Given the foregoing, there is rising popular and scholarly interest in making public transit systems “fare-free.” Accordingly, in this research we will carefully review and synthesize the current states of both the practice of and research literature on fare-free transit. We will focus our review on the various dimensions of equity raised by charging for transit fares, and how they have/are likely to play out with conversion to fare-free transit service.

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By the fall of 2020, most transit systems had recovered to about half of their pre-pandemic ridership, but transit’s recovery largely stalled there, even as rates of driving, walking, and biking have mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Research has shown that the riders who left transit in the pandemic tended to be higher income, better educated, more likely white or Asian, and with access to private motor vehicles. Spatial patterns of ridership have shifted dramatically as well, with downtowns and other major job centers losing the most riders, and low-income neighborhoods retaining the most riders. In net, the level, timing, and direction of transit travel have changed dramatically.

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The global COVID-19 pandemic has shocked many economic and social systems. One of the most profoundly affected has been the public transit systems that serve cities large and small. Ridership initially plummeted, service has been cut, and in some cases slashed, and public health concerns are many, and finances are increasingly tight on public transit systems around the globe, in the U.S., and here in California. To understand how public transit is evolving in the pandemic, UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies researchers have looked into what transit service is changing, how it is changing, why it is changing, and for whom it is changing. The project has also examined how well the changes made affect the spread of COVID-19, and how transit can continue to safely serve the mobility needs of essential workers during the pandemic.

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This project reports on changes and evolving operations in public transit during the COVID-19 pandemic. With a focus on transit ridership and transit service hours, this project first tracks where, how, and why transit supply and demand has changed. Since reaching an April 2020 nadir both nationally and in California, transit ridership has recovered slowly: as of July 2022, boardings were 61 percent and 56 percent of their respective national and California baselines. In California, service has been restored faster than riders have returned. This project next examines and showcases what established strategies for increasing transit ridership remain relevant in and post-pandemic.

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More than half a million individuals experience homelessness every night in the U.S. With the scale of the crisis often surpassing the capacities of existing safety nets — all the more so since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic — many turn to transit vehicles, stops, and stations for shelter. Many also use transit to reach destinations such as workplaces, shelters, and community service centers. This project investigates the intersections of the pandemic, transit, and homelessness; the scale of homelessness on transit; and how transit agencies are responding to the problem. All told, centering the mobility and wellbeing of unhoused riders fits within transit’s social service role and is important to improving outcomes for them and for all riders.

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This project presents and reviews the available sources of data on public transit riders and ridership, as a resource for those who manage or simply wish to understand U.S. transit. In conducting this review, the researchers consider the advantages and disadvantages of publicly available data on transit from a variety of public and private sources, as well the relatively scarcer and less available sources of data on other providers of shared mobility, like ride-hail services, that compete with and complement public transit and pieces missing from the transit analytics pie. Data gaps both align with existing inequities and enable them to continue, unmeasured, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made closing these gaps all the more important.

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From 2014 to 2018, California lost more than 165 million annual boardings, a drop of over 11%. This project examines public transit in California in the 2010s and the factors behind its falling ridership. Transit ridership has been on a longer-term decline in regions like Greater Los Angeles and on buses, while ridership losses in the Bay Area are more recent. While overall transit boardings across the state are down since 2014, worrisome underlying trends date back earlier as patronage failed to keep up with population growth. But reduced transit service is not responsible for ridership losses, as falling transit ridership occurred at the same time as operators instead increased their levels of transit service. What factors help to explain losses in transit ridership? Increased access to automobiles explains much, if not most, of declining transit use. Private vehicle access has increased significantly in California and, outside of the Bay Area, is likely the biggest single cause of falling transit ridership. Additionally, new ride-hail services such as Lyft and Uber allow travelers to purchase automobility one trip at a time and likely serve as a substitute for at least some transit trips. Finally, neighborhoods are changing in ways that do not bode well for public transit. Households are increasingly locating in outlying areas where they experience longer commutes and less transit access to employment. At the same time, a smaller share of high-propensity transit users now live in the state’s most transit-friendly neighborhoods.

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Public transit ridership has been falling nationally and in California since 2014. The San Francisco Bay Area, with the state’s highest rates of transit use, had until recently resisted those trends, especially compared to Greater Los Angeles. However, in 2017 and 2018 the region lost over five percent (>27 million) of its annual riders, despite a booming economy and service increases. This report examines Bay Area transit ridership to understand the dimensions of changing transit use, its possible causes, and potential solutions. We find that: 1) the steepest ridership losses have come on buses, at off-peak times, on weekends, in non-commute directions, on outlying lines, and on operators that do not serve the region’s core employment clusters; 2) transit trips in the region are increasingly commute-focused, particularly into and out of downtown San Francisco; 3) transit commuters are increasingly non-traditional transit users, such as those with higher incomes and automobile access; 4) the growing job-housing imbalance in the Bay Area is related to rising housing costs and likely depressing transit ridership as more residents live in less transit-friendly parts of the region; and 5) ridehail is substituting for some transit trips, particularly in the off-peak. Arresting falling transit use will likely require action both by transit operators (to address peak capacity constraints; improve off-peak service; ease fare payments; adopt fare structures that attract off-peak riders; and better integrate transit with new mobility options) and public policymakers in other realms (to better meter and manage private vehicle use and to increase the supply and affordability of housing near job centers).

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Every regular school day, LAUSD operates over 14,000 hours of service using 1,307 school buses to serve over 38,000 students, who attend more than 300 schools in more than 30 subdistricts, on 1,669 routes over a service area of about 750 square miles. Bus contractors own and operate another 700 school buses to provide service for LAUSD. LAUSD also provides service for midday, athletic events, after-school programs, and on weekends. The buses are subject to traffic conditions — operating both during peak traffic times and during non-peak traffic times — and to changing enrollment patterns. LA’s very large geographic area, as compared to other US cities, makes the problem particularly acute (and also scientifically interesting).The project team seeks to help the Student Transportation Operation of the LAUSD better match its capacity with demand. Specifically, UCLA seeks to answer the following stakeholder question: What is the best way to operate their bus service within regulatory and policy guidelines?

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Transit use is on the decline in many American cities. Research has shown that concerns about transit safety may influence travel behavior and transit use, and that women are particularly fearful about victimization while travelling. Studies have also shown that women are also very concerned about one type of crime — sexual harassment — which often goes unreported, and thus remains largely invisible to transit operators.The research team will survey college students in 16 cities in six continents to examine their patterns of mobility and transit, with an emphasis on their feelings of safety on public transit and other transportation modes, experiences of sexual harassment, and other types of crime and victimization on public transport and other transportation modes. The results of the survey will establish the extent to which fear regarding their safety affects college students’ transit ridership, and the research team will examine how survey responses may vary because of the students’ sociodemographic characteristics.

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Ridership at many transit agencies in California is declining. One issue raised in Falling Transit Ridership, but only lightly explored, is the changing spatial location of low-wage work and workers in California, and the implications of these changes for commuting and transit use. Transit commuting is highest in dense urban neighborhoods where residents live reasonably close to employment opportunities. However, low-income households and low-wage employment has suburbanized over time (Kneebone 2009; Kneebone, 2017) making it increasingly difficult for workers to commute by transit. Drawing on data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program the project will quantify changes in the spatial location of employment and workers from 2002 to 2015 in the five major California metropolitan areas. In particular, the analysis will include (a) the extent to which jobs and workers have decentralized over time by wage group (low, medium, high) (b) the changing location of workers and employment relative to transit-friendly neighborhoods and transit supply. The second part of the analysis examines whether rising rents in some regions of the state are pushing workers to live further from their workplaces over time.

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In the last ten years transit use in Southern California has fallen significantly. This report investigates that falling transit use. The project examines patterns of transit service and patronage over time and across the region and considers an array of explanations for falling transit use: declining transit service levels, eroding transit service quality, rising fares, falling fuel prices, the growth of Lyft and Uber, the migration of frequent transit users to outlying neighborhoods with less transit service, and rising vehicle ownership. While all of these factors probably play some role, the research concludes that the most significant factor is increased motor vehicle access, particularly among low-income households that have traditionally supplied the region with its most frequent and reliable transit users.

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