Vancouver vs. San Francisco: A Tale of Two Transit Recoveries

We’ve all kind of blocked it out of our minds but the COVID pandemic was absolutely devastating for transit ridership and even now, four years since 2020, we haven’t fully recovered. But some cities and systems actually fared much worse, while others have rebounded almost to their pre-pandemic numbers. In this video we’re going to take a look at the fall and recovery of rapid transit systems in the US and Canada to see who made it through the best and the worst.

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Creative commons images of transit vehicles in different cities:

[pranavkumar]

I live in Metro Vancouver area and the transit is so damn well managed. It's not the fastest (metro Vancouver has more than 15 municipalities/cities), but you know exactly how much time you are gonna need to go somewhere. The communication about disruptions are very well communicated. The fare system and tech is extremely well crafted (based on zones and time, tap with credit cards, interac cards, compass cards etc). I am grateful for it everyday.

[JamesTaylor-zsgq]

Notably, Vancouver has a single direction (AM inbound, PM outbound) commuter train service that has fared much worse than the rest of the system in terms of recovery. This supports the argument that serving a broader range of trips than just 9-5 commutes is one of the most important factors.

[dianethulin]

BART also suffered from dangerous situations on the trains as well as antiquated cars. They have now retired all of the original fleet, addressed crime and shortened the cars to eight. Ridership is coming back and I’m on cars that are frequently packed

[brianlau]

I took the SkyTrain from Commercial-Broadway Station today in Vancouver because there was a special event happening close by. The station was so busy but the crowd control was so well managed because of how frequent the trains were coming. I didn't have to worry about not being able to get on a crowded train, so I decided to just wait another minute for the next train to come. So grateful for the transit service in Vancouver.

[ficus]

Rider income is definitely a big part of the story in LA. The LA metro is the cheapest I’ve seen in North America with a $1.75 fare good for 2 hours.

Although the LA metro network has wide coverage the overall trip times are generally very poor to the point that driving in traffic is always faster unless your origin and destination are literally right next to the red or purple lines.

For that reason nearly anyone who can afford to drive does.

[abchaplin]

I hope you do a similar examination of light rail post-pandemic. I would like to hear your interpretation of how OC Transpo has been consistently "leaning into the punches" coming out of current events crossed with their management decisions.

[ronnyrueda]

Some additional context for LAs Heavy Rail numbers. The dip from Q1 2023 to Q1 2024 has to do with downtown riders shifting from the Heavy Rail stations on the B/D lines the new Light Rail subway stations on the A/E lines.

[fallenshallrise]

I live in Vancouver and visited SF last year. The difference between the 2 systems is pretty clear. I appreciated the BART but it's slow, infrequent and sits at the station for minutes at a time probably because it's human driven. Also the stations themselves have about half as many lights in them as they should so they feel dark and foreboding. If you didn't ride SkyTrain for a couple of years and then you try it out again and the stations are bright and the train you need shows up in under 3 minutes and is fast then of course you will be reminded of how good the service is and will use it for more trips VS going down to a dark underground platform and waiting 20 minutes for a train to arrive.

[chromebomb]

Couple notes as a Californian who lived in LA thru the Pandemic and who now lives in SF:

LA: You are spot on about rider income, vast majority of people on the LA Metro do not have any other option to get to work and most of those people were essential workers during the pandemic(including myself). I just looked at my phone and saw a photo I took April 6 2020 of a crowded westbound Expo line train. Unfortunately this is a reason why LA's transit system is stuck in perpetual purgatory as the cultural & economic divide of people who use the system is even wider than pre pandemic. Which makes "recovery" so much more difficult.

SF: The Bay Area is a complicated place, BART is basically a commuter system for suburban commuters to get to Downtown SF. SF invented the tech for WFH, housing prices were wildly inflated so people left or they don't come in anymore. I now work in downtown SF and rush hour ridership on BART into & our of downtown is coming back(only on a T, W, T scheudle, Mondays & Fridays are dead). Muni on the other hand(which is light rail and buses and only operates in SF) is has had a much stronger recovery and some bus routes that go outside downtown have higher ridership than pre pandemic. So its not all bad news but BART needs more money to survive. Not to mention BART had the highest farebox recovery rate of any Metro & loosing all that ridership is not good.

[BrennanZeigler]

Chicago’s problem too is that it is now regarded as the worst run transit agency in America. It wasn’t always like this but their current leadership is making it virtually impossible to recover to pre-pandemic ridership. Keep in mind, CTA president Dorval Carter has never taken transit, instead preferring to be chauffeured to his job. He refuses to interact with riders, he lies about hiring new staff, he refuses to attend city council meetings aimed at improving transit, you name it. Instead of trying to boost ridership, he’s choosing to keep these policies in place, claiming they’re just “cost cutting measures”. In fact CTA leadership has gotten so bad, that Illinois politicians are now planning on merging CTA, Metra, and Pace into one state owned agency, which has been met with mixed reception. Most people in the city support the merger, but most people in the suburbs do not

[adnanilyas]

I know the video focused on proper metro systems, but I wanted to highlight one major successful “recovery” for a far more modest American transit system. The Cincinnati streetcar is extremely limited, with just one short looping line downtown. After fierce political opposition, the city’s only rail mass transit system opened in 2016, with really weak attendance. By 2019, it did about half a million total riders in a year. Numbers cratered with the pandemic with the line mostly closed for 6 months in 2020. However, since then, it has massively improved. The city eliminated fares in November 2021 on the rationale that the cost to enforce the fares was higher than the revenue and, since then, it has repeatedly broken attendance records. By the end of 2021, annual attendance had reached 104% the attendance of 2019. Numbers continued to rise and annual attendance surpassed over 1 million riders, more than double 2019.

[adanactnomew]

I think the reason the Skytrain is doing so well is there is a lot of TOD, as well as the city not being an easy city to drive in in areas that the Skytrain serves. If people go downtown they will opt for the train over driving.

[alexhaowenwong]

San Diego LRT recovered so spectacularly that it was #1 in 2023 US LRT ridership despite being #5 in 2019. And 2024 ridership is set to break all time record highs.

[luckytran]

Thanks for covering this! COVID and public health concerns are frequently left out of conversations about public transport accessibility. Many disabled and higher risk people, as well as people generally concerned about protecting their health haven’t been able to access public transport for years due to the lack of masks and clean air (great point about Vancouver being an open-air system). This is a huge equity issue because cars are expensive, and people don't own them in cities like NYC. As someone who works in public health, I'd love to see more public health and pandemic resilience being built into and added to public transit. Open air systems aren't a fit for all cities, but things every city can do is to provide air quality monitoring, install clean air infrastructure, provide free high quality masks to riders, increase bike lane infrastructure etc.

[CNHFTC]

SoCal here; your analysis of LA’s Metro is pretty spot on. The subway system runs mostly through very dense, low-income immigrant neighborhoods where much of the population are “essential workers.” That helped keep ridership as high as it was during the pandemic. However, that drop from 2023 to 2024 can partly be attributed to perceptions of the system being unsafe which is keeping riders away.

[slam]

I'm so glad that Vancouver's transit system had recovered to pre-pandemic level. Livability of a city increase when you have a prosperous transit system.

[Euniceiscool]

Vancouver's Skytrain network needed to be expanded like a decade ago.

[timtwoface]

I live in Vancouver and just visited San Francisco...both cities have great transit systems and I think Vancouver is among the best for a city its size. San Francisco's BART, Muni, and other combined systems are excellent for a city its size (approx 2-3 times the size of Vancouver if you take the entire Bay Area into account). BART does feel dated and it's a lot more expensive...and behind schedule...but once you're onboard it's a pretty convenient system.

[critiqueofthegothgf]

la retaining the most ridership was crazy surprising but the reasoning makes sense, especially when you put it into the context of its initial ridership numbers

[Immortalcheese]

I stopped taking the TTC during the pandemic and only really resumed in late 2022. It was very odd to not be on transit for over 2 years and opting to drive everywhere instead. Now I am back to daily ridership and it feels so much better than having to drive everywhere