Bay Area gridlock has all but evaporated as workers stay home
Commutes cut in half, some drivers say; bridges, BART show sharp drops
It took Matthew Jue just 25 minutes to drive from his home in Newark to his job in Campbell this week, a commute that normally takes nearly twice that time.
He’s discovered what everyone on the Bay Area’s notoriously congested freeways has noticed as companies encourage employees to work from home amid the COVID-19 outbreak. “Traffic is much lighter,” he said, “outside of what’s normal.”
But just how much lighter? While Jue and other commuters report dramatic drops in morning and evening commutes, quantifying the decline isn’t easy in part because bridge toll data is tallied by a different agency than highway traffic, which is difficult to gauge.
Here’s what we know. CalTrans said highway traffic delays have declined by 11.5% on weekdays in District 4, which covers the Bay Area from Santa Clara County to Sonoma
County from March 1-9 this year compared with the same period in 2019. The agency did not provide more recent figures.
CalTrans also said it could not “definitively attribute” the drop to the coronavirus pandemic, but virtually all of Silicon Valley’s big employers have asked staffs to work from home, universities have canceled in-person classes, and conferences and large public events aren’t occurring.
Traffic on Bay Area bridges is also down, dramatically in some cases. The morning peak on the Dumbarton Bridge was down 25% Thursday compared with the same Thursday last year, dropping from 22,200 to 16,700 vehicles, according to data from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge saw only a 4% overall decrease in volume during the Thursday morning rush, but a 17% decrease in the carpool lane, suggesting that fewer people are sharing rides. The San Mateo Bridge saw a 12% decrease.
Kristin Carlson usually has an hourlong commute from San Jose to her home in Morgan Hill when she leaves work at around 3 p.m. Her evening commute “has lightened up considerably” this week. She’s getting at least 15 minutes of time back.
Freeways and bridges aren’t the only places affected. BART had just 268,000 passengers Wednesday, a 35% drop from a typical weekday. By Thursday, ridership was 45% below average. The agency’s leaders are asking lawmakers for emergency funding to make up for hundreds of thousands of dollars BART is losing each day as its ridership plummets.
It is not just commuters who are noticing the difference. “I have lived in the Bay Area since 1968, and have never seen so little traffic,” said Paul Jacobs, a retired lawyer and former mayor of Saratoga. “But then in my 74 years, I’ve never experienced a pandemic either.”
Jacobs sees this disruption as a vision of what could be for the region, if people continue working from home. “This is a chance to make significant changes in the way we live,” Jacobs said. “I hope that we won’t squander the opportunity to learn something new.”