Terra Incognita: California Transit Agency Perspectives on Demand, Service, and Finance in the Age of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic upended transit use, finance, and management. To investigate these effects two years into the pandemic, we conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with senior managers at transit agencies in the most populous U.S. state, California. We found that the pandemic generated many operational and managerial challenges for transit agencies. Ridership plummeted, then slowly recovered, but is still well below pre-pandemic levels at most agencies. Commuter trips to and from major job centers were especially slow to return. In response to decreased demand, public health concerns, and uncertain finances, many agencies cut services and spending early on. As a result, fare revenues declined, in some cases precipitously. However, federal pandemic relief funds proved essential in filling budgetary gaps, stabilizing finances, preventing layoffs, and maintaining services. Other transit subsidies mostly bounced back robustly. Our interviews suggest that, though California transit agencies experimented with free fares, few fareless programs were made permanent. Their challenges include considerable uncertainty associated with future travel demand, looming financial shortfalls at systems that formerly had high farebox recovery and are still drawing on federal pandemic funds to backfill their fare revenue losses, and protracted labor shortages of drivers and mechanics that are preventing many systems from providing desired levels of service.