Gas prices could fuel a return to public transit
BART, Caltrain, VTA trying to woo back riders — and are already seeing results
One Thursday morning, Marshall Ward hopped in his Range Rover, got on Highway 24 and met a wall of traffic.
“I turned around,” said Ward, who left his vehicle at home and instead took BART into San Francisco. “I looked at my tank — last time it cost me $100 (to fill up) — I saw the traffic and I just realized: Why am I driving?”
With Russia's invasion of Ukraine fueling a 22% spike in statewide gas prices over the last month, many commuters are now mulling cheaper alternatives. Transit agencies across the Bay Area, like BART, Caltrain and the VTA in Santa Clara County, are looking to seize the moment and have kicked their public relations into high gear as they hope to woo back commuters after the pandemic and the shift to remote work decimated Bay Area transit.
With COVID-19 restrictions loosening and many employers summoning workers back to the office, the spike in gas prices could give public transit the ridership bump that it desperately needs. Some agencies are already seeing results. On March 9-10 BART saw its highest ridership since the start of the pandemic with over 125,000 trips each day. Meanwhile, VTA saw a 24% increase in ridership versus last week.
“I haven't seen anything sardine can-like, like back in in the good old days, but
there are definitely more people on,” said Richard Shearer, an attorney who works in San Francisco. During the pandemic he was accustomed to scoring a seat anywhere he wanted on mostly empty BART cars but that's no longer guaranteed. “I've done more standing in the past week than I did in the previous several months,” he added.
In recent days local transit operators have taken to social media with cheeky posts highlighting the fact that trains get to cruise by traffic and the cost of a VTA bus ride remains unchanged at $2.50 — despite the spiraling prices at the pump. Caltrain posted an image of its weekday schedule on Twitter with the caption: “Avoid higher gas prices with this one weird trick.”
“You couldn't time historic high gas prices and offices reopening any better for transit recovery,” said Alicia Trost, a BART
spokesperson, who pointed to a recent 15%-20% surge in riders at the office-oriented Embarcadero and Montgomery stations in downtown San Francisco. Trost has been pitching the rail service to employees of major companies like Wells Fargo that have announced new hybrid work schedules. “It's a pivotal moment,” she added.
The bump in riders doesn't mean public transit will be packed again anytime soon like it was before COVID-19 when BART tallied over 400,000 passenger trips each day. For now, it's still hovering around 30% of pre-pandemic levels.
The loss in passenger fare revenue has left massive holes in agencies' operating budgets. Rising fuel costs will likely worsen their deficits but transit operators say for now they are resistant to hiking fares as they depend on hundreds of millions in
federal relief money to balance their budgets for the coming years.
The hopes for a transit resurgence are confronting serious difficulties that have hampered service in recent days, including a fiery Caltrain crash on March 10 that injured 13 people, BART suspending an entire line over mechanical issues, and bus driver shortages.
On March 10, commuters packed onto standingroom-only trains at BART'S Macarthur station. Much of the passenger congestion was due to the ongoing Red Line closure, which forced San Francisco-bound riders from Richmond through Berkeley to transfer in Oakland, but gas prices were on the minds of many passengers.
Among them was Mahogany Moton, an event planner who until recently wanted to buy a car to reduce her reliance on BART. “But now I definitely won't,” said Moton. “It's so expensive
I wouldn't be able to afford to drive it.”
Andrew Gillies, who works in hardware, said his home is filled with talk about navigating the rising fuel prices. “It's been a dinner conversation with my wife. How do we juggle things?” Gillies said.
Meanwhile, car traffic has approached pre-pandemic levels. On the Bay Bridge, morning rush-hour congestion is slightly worse now than it was in 2019, according to data compiled by
the Bay Area Council.
It is unclear how many people will make the switch to trains and buses because of the surging gas prices, but BART has already found one new customer in Ed Duarte.
For months he has been driving his car from Oakland to San Francisco for a job at Whole Foods.
“I'm using the BART system now for the first time,” Duarte said with a smile. “We just said, `Let's try public transportation.' ”