As the state's vaccination rollout continues on and we look ahead to a post-pandemic return to normalcy, commuters and lawmakers throughout the Boston area are left to wonder how — and when — mass transit service might be impacted. Bob Seay, GBH News transportation reporter, joined All Things Considered host Arun Rath this week to talk about what the coronavirus crisis has meant for local transportation.
One year ago, headlines read that traffic in Massachusetts, and especially in the Boston metro area, was the most congested in the entire country. “We had a T that had cars derailing and catching on fire. We had commuter rail trains that were delayed. And trying to solve the transportation problems, I remember, seemed to be a Herculean task,” said Seay, looking back on the months leading up to the statewide shutdown due to the pandemic.
When the outbreak officially landed in Massachusetts and Governor Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency, “everything just comes to a stop,” said Seay. “Suddenly, no one is traveling anywhere because, frankly, there’s nowhere to go.”
The sudden and dramatic pause in transportation of all kinds — roads, rails, and airways — was echoed across the country, as people heeding state and CDC mandates and public health guidelines hunkered down at home. “It was like we were in 'ghost town mode' for a while,” said Rath.
According to Seay, one of the first ramifications of the transportation shutdown was that people who could began working from home. “That’s when we all became Zoom neophytes, and began to try to conduct our daily business via WiFi and the internet,” he said.
The phenomenon of many people working from home is a trend that Seay thinks will continue even after the pandemic is over, with an estimated 50 percent of workers not returning physically to their workplaces every day as they once did. “That’s going to effect local transit tremendously,” he said.
Using the T as an example, Seay noted that the one subway line that has retained most of its ridership throughout the pandemic is the blue line, a line that serves primarily working class, lower income communities north of the city. Similarly, bus ridership, while down, did not drop as dramatically, “because, in fact, a lot of working people need buses to get around,” said Seay. “We’re talking about people who have no other travel option.”
The commuter rail, on the other hand, saw “tremendous” dropoffs in ridership throughout the pandemic — more than 90 percent, according to Seay — because it serves communities made up primarily of those commuting to Boston for work, many of whom now have the option to work remotely from home.
The pandemic has revealed inequities in the way the city and country operates in myriad ways, including transportation, says Seay.
"It's been like a great experiment. Let's try to stop transit and see who needs to take it."Bob Seay, GBH News Transportation Reporter
This year, the MBTA has been paying close attention to how its various bus and rail lines are faring, and, according to Seay, experimenting with the cost and schedule of lines that serve working class communities. “In the past, [the] commuter rail has always been too expensive for a lot of people to take,” he said.
Now, Seay says that riders in communities like Lynn and Brockton can take the commuter rail for $2.40, the cost of a subway ticket, instead of the $10 or more that they were paying before the pandemic, allowing greater ease of travel into and out of the city where many of the available jobs are.
In addition, beginning next month, many commuter rail schedules will reflect more regular service throughout the day. “That is something that people have been calling for for a long time, to make the service more dependable,” said Seay. He expects to see these changes to the cost and schedule of the commuter rail to remain even after the pandemic is over.
As the pandemic winds down and the city prepares for a return to normalcy, lawmakers are expected to debate how and when to restore services, and in what manner. “What they’ve realized is that there is a population that absolutely needs mass transit. And in many cases these are our front line essential workers who need to get to their jobs,” said Seay.
Seay anticipates a major transformation of the bus system, in particular, which was already underway before the pandemic, including increasing service to certain routes where buses have become overcrowded and adding designated bus lanes to mitigate traffic.
And then there is the question of weekend commuter rail, which has been eliminated altogether across seven of the commuter rail lines. “That [change] has been vociferously opposed by people, because they have no other option,” said Seay.
He noted that ferry service, which was paused altogether, is also making a comeback along with some late-night commuter rail service. “They [the MBTA] are really making real-time changes trying to respond to what they think are the needs of the most transit-dependent, critical population,” he said, adding that transit advocates feel that the city should rely on CARES Act funding from the federal government to keep transit services going so that transportation is available to workers as the economy recovers.
As to whether the mass transit system will ever return to where it was before the pandemic, Seay says likely not, due to the working from home phenomenon and the fact that operating mass transit is so expensive.
“Without the ridership and the revenue, that burden is going to fall on, basically, governments, and more taxes; perhaps an increase in the gas tax,” said Seay. “Once the federal aid runs out, the MBTA is going to be faced with this very serious problem of how to fund the operations not really knowing what ridership will be.”
LISTEN: Will mass transit ever be the same post-pandemic?
