Work

Should we blame COVID-19 for the decline in transit ridership, or was it merely a stimulant?

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Public transit ridership significantly declined during the COVID-19 pandemic and has not yet rebounded, even though the virus substantially subsided, and people have mostly returned to their normal lives. This suggests that there are reasons for this drop that go beyond health concerns and work from home arrangements. Focusing on pre-pandemic transit users, this study aims at understanding the most influential reasons for the transit ridership decline by digging into people's attitudes and perceptions. Exploiting a dataset of survey responses from the Puget Sound region in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, we performed two analyses: Structural Equation Modeling, and user clustering (based on attitudes) combined with statistical tests. The core of both analyses was people's attitudes/perceptions toward three matters: sharing rides with strangers, doing activities online vs. in person, and pandemic health risks. The results showed while those three all play a role in people's post-pandemic reduced transit use frequency, the reluctance to share rides with others is the only significant factor and its magnitude is three times larger than the health concerns/fears associated with the pandemic. The latter was found to have rather an indirect effect on reducing transit ridership, through its significant and direct impact on both ridesharing reluctance and online activities preference. In other words, the pandemic created/stimulated a desire in people to do certain activities (or a portion of those) online and intensified the reluctance to share rides with strangers in them, and these two attitudes stayed with people post pandemic, resulting in yet low transit ridership.

Source: Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives

DOI: 10.1016/j.trip.2025.101397

Authors: Helia Mohammadi-Mavi, Mustafa Fardin, Andisheh Ranjbari

Institution: Pennsylvania State University

Language: English

Topic: Transportation Planning and Optimization

Subfield: Transportation

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Good health and well-being, Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,400