Rail transit ridership changes in COVID-19: Lessons for station area planning in California

Emerging evidence suggests that the recovery of transit ridership post-COVID has been uneven, especially for rail transit. This study aims to understand the station area land use, built form, and transit network characteristics that explain station-level changes in transit ridership pre- and post-COVID, and explores the degree to which those changes are rail transit-specific or the result of overall changes in visits to station areas. Specifically, we examine ridership changes between 2019 and 2021 for 242 rail stations belonging to the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS), Sacramento Regional Transit (SACRT), and LA Metro and associate those changes with the built environment, socio-demographics, and rail network characteristics around each station using regression analysis. We also compare these changes in ridership to overall changes in activity aggregated by station area type. We find there was an overall decrease in station-level ridership of 72 %, but changes were not uniform, with 92 stations decreasing more and 152 stations decreasing less. We also find that ridership declined more drastically than overall station area activity across all four rail systems, which implies that rail transit riders were more sensitive to pandemic-related changes than other commuters. The findings suggest that a rail transit ridership recovery strategy should strategize to reinvent and reinforce downtowns as destinations, and shift rail transit services to appeal to non-commute travel, as well as enhance bike and pedestrian accessibility around stations.