Essential Workers' Huge Impact on Demand.

• Position: PUBLIC TRANSIT

While demand for public transit dropped about 73% across the country after the pandemic hit, the reduction did not impact all cities equally, details a study at Ohio State University, Columbus, in which researchers analyzed activity data from a widely used public transit navigation app.

Large coastal cities--like Seattle, Wash.; San Francisco, Calif.; and Washington, D.C.--saw demand fall further than cities in the Midwest and South. The reason had to do with the nature of jobs in different cities and who actually was using public transportation before the pandemic, says lead author Luyu Liu, doctoral student in geography.

"Many of the people who used public transit in large coastal cities could work remotely from home after the pandemic, but in cities in the Midwest and the deep South, most public transit users have jobs where they still had to come in to work during the pandemic and didn't have any other choice."

Study coauthor Harvey Miller, professor of geography, indicates that what we have called "essential workers" during the pandemic are the core users of public transit in these cities often labeled as non-transit dependent.

"These are the health care workers, people working service jobs, working in grocery stores, people who clean and maintain buildings," says Miller, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis. "It is a dramatic social equity story about who has to move during the pandemic."

The researchers used data on 113 county-level transit systems in 63 metro areas and 28...