On the London Underground, Piccadilly Circus station is almost empty on weekday mornings, while the Delhi Metro carries less than half the passengers it used to take. In Rio, unpaid bus drivers went on strike. New York subway traffic is only a third of what it was before the pandemic.
A year after the coronavirus pandemic began, public transport is hanging by a thread in many cities around the world. Passengers remain at home or afraid to board buses and trains. And without tariffs, public transport revenues fell off a cliff. In some places, the service has been cut. In others, fares have increased and public transport workers face the prospect of layoffs.
This is a disaster for the world’s ability to face that other global crisis: climate change. Public transport offers a relatively simple way for cities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention a way to improve air quality, noise and congestion.
“We are facing perhaps the most important crisis in the public transport sector in different parts of the world,” said Sérgio Avelleda, director of urban mobility at the World Resources Institute and former secretary of transport in São Paulo, Brazil. “It is urgent to act.”
But how to act? The transport agencies that have been bailed out by the government are wondering how long this generosity will last and, almost everywhere, transport experts are struggling to figure out how to better adapt public transport to passengers’ needs as cities begin to emerge pandemic.
For now, people are simply not moving much. Even in cities like Delhi, where most companies are open, many office workers are working from home and universities have not yet resumed face-to-face classes. Paris has a 6 pm curfew.
In some places, fear of the virus has prompted people to get into cars. In the United States, used car sales have skyrocketed, as have used car prices. In India, a company that sells used cars online saw sales increase in 2020 and its own value as a company jumped to $ 1 billion, according to press reports. Elsewhere, bicycle sales have increased, suggesting that people are cycling a little more.
The concern for the future is twofold. If passengers avoid public transport of cars while their cities are recovering from the pandemic, this has huge implications for air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Most importantly, if public transport systems continue to lose revenue from passenger fares, they will not be able to make the necessary investments to be efficient, safe and attractive to passengers.
There are some outliers. In Shanghai, for example, public transport numbers plummeted in February 2020, but passengers returned because new coronavirus infections remain low and the economy is recovering.
But the picture is bleak in many other cities.
On the Paris metro, the number of passengers was slightly more than half the normal in the first two months of this year. Île-de-France Mobilités, the transport agency for the Paris metropolitan area, said it lost 2.6 billion euros, or more than $ 3 billion, last year. The agency projects a deficit of over a billion euros this year.
In Amsterdam, the number of passengers on city trams and buses is around a third of normal, and the public transport agency’s website advises people to “travel only when absolutely necessary”. In Rome, the number of Metro passengers remains below half the pre-pandemic levels.
One of the busiest tube systems in the world, the London Underground, which normally makes about four million trips every day of the week, is currently operating at about 20 percent of its normal capacity. Buses are a little more populous, running around 40% of normal. The city’s transit agency, which has already projected a budget surplus for 2020, has been counting on the government’s rescue since the pandemic. It is expected that it will take at least two years for the use of public transport to return to pre-pandemic levels.
“It has been very devastating, to be completely honest,” said Alex Williams, director of urban transport planning for London. “One of our concerns is the substantial declines in public transport and the higher levels of car use.”
London is one of the few cities around the world with a congestion charge designed to reduce car traffic in the city center. London and Paris sought to use roadblocks to expand cycle paths.
In the Indian capital, New Delhi, the subway reopened last September after being suspended for many months. The number of passengers in February 2021 hovered below 2.6 million, compared with more than 5.7 million in the same month of the previous year, and bus traffic was just over half of pre-pandemic levels.
Lucky are the agencies, as in India and across Europe, that are subsidized by their governments. The situation is even more difficult in cities where people depend to a large extent on private bus companies.
In Lagos, Nigeria, fares have doubled on private bus lines for trips longer than a kilometer, or just over half a mile.
In Rio de Janeiro, a bus network that was once famous is in shambles. The private company operating the system has cut more than a third of its fleet and laid off 800 employees, as the number of passengers has halved since last March, according to the city’s transport department. Bus driver strikes have made bus travel even slower and more chaotic.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said José Carlos Sacramento, 68, the leader of a Rio bus workers’ union that has been working in public transport for five decades. “I don’t think this will ever go back to normal.”
City officials said they hope to use the crisis as an opportunity to renew the system, including persuading private bus companies to be more transparent about their operations in exchange for possible financial assistance from the government.
After all, said Maína Celidonio, head of the city’s transportation department, a clean and efficient bus system is essential for Rio not only to reduce its carbon emissions, but also to clean the air. “It is not just an environmental issue, but a public health issue,” said Celidonio.
The biggest challenge for all cities is to fix their public transport systems now so passengers can return, said Mohamed Mezghani, head of the International Public Transport Association. They could adjust service at peak times as distance work from home became more common, expand bus-only lanes that would make commuting more efficient and comfortable, or improve ventilation systems to assure citizens that public transport is safe.
“The cities that were investing will come out stronger,” said Mezghani. “People will feel more comfortable traveling on a new modern public transport system. It is a matter of perception in the end. “
Shola Lawal and Hari Kumar contributed reports.