Two excellent recent analyses in the Washington Post show how transit issues and shutdowns can dramatically shift people into cars, ride-hailing, and even towards more teleworking.
A service disruption for D.C.’s Metro subway this past weekend created miles-long traffic jams (see the photo above) and a boom in business for ride-hail services.
Also, for the first time in a long time, more commuters are riding Metro four days per week than five days.
Faiz Siddiqui reports:
A partial shutdown of Metro’s Blue and Yellow lines from 7 a.m. Saturday through closing Sunday caught some travelers arriving at Reagan National Airport by surprise.
On ride-hailing platforms, prices surged, with too few drivers to accommodate the extra passengers. Between them, it was likely the ride-hailing companies carried out thousands more trips than on a normal Sunday. And that was just at the airport — typically among the busiest ride-hailing hubs in a given city.
Meanwhile — and perhaps expectedly given the shift from transit to roads — traffic swelled. Sunday evening, severe traffic congestion was reported at National, which was said to be at least partially due to the closing of the station.
On the telework front, Martine Powers reports:
For the first time in years, commuters in the Washington region who ride Metro four days a week outnumber those who ride every weekday — a subtle but significant ridership shift that transit officials fear may have long-term implications for the transit agency.
According to data released recently by Metro’s Office of Planning, there has been a steady decline since 2013 in the average number of monthly trips taken by commuters carrying SmarTrip cards — down from 20 trips per month to 18. And data analysts contend that only about 30 percent of Metro’s recent ridership losses are due to people abandoning the system because of reliability and problems with on-time performance.
It’s a trend that weighs heavily on Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld. Metro must improve service and reliability, he said, but teleworking is a threat to the agency’s finances — and something over which it has no control.
“It’s not even four days a week now,” Wiedefeld said at a recent meeting, citing new numbers from the federal government on rates of teleworking. “People are coming in twice and three times a month. I can’t change that. That’s going to be what it is.”
Read the telework article here.