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BART carried 100,000 fewer riders on Monday than it does on a typical weekday, a 25-percent drop that came after many large companies told their employees to work from home amid mounting anxiety over the spreading coronavirus.
Passengers reported finding unusually generous amounts of elbow room on rush hour trains again Tuesday, as well as empty spaces in station parking lots that normally fill first thing in the morning. It’s the latest way the virus has reoriented life in the Bay Area, indicating that the dip in ridership that began last week has accelerated rapidly — and pointing to potential financial trouble for the system as efforts to contain the virus drag on.
None of the nearly 100 people who have tested positive for coronavirus in the Bay Area’s nine counties are believed to have traveled aboard BART, Caltrain, VTA, SamTrans or AC Transit, officials from those agencies said Tuesday.
And the Bay Area’s bus and rail operators have sought to reassure worried passengers that they are doing all they can to prevent the spread of the disease: BART officials have stepped up daily cleaning of the handrails, fare boxes and entrance gates that passengers typically touch throughout the day. The agency also said it has a plan in the event someone who tests positive did ride on the system. In that case, BART said it would alert the public, isolate any train cars the person traveled in, and spray the cars with a “hospital-grade cleaning solution to fully disinfect” the interior.
BART started seeing its ridership fall last week, as the number of Bay Area COVID-19 cases rose. Big companies like Twitter began telling employees to work from home, Others announced that they were pulling out of planned conferences, and news of the virus-stricken Grand Princess cruise ship headed to San Francisco grabbed headlines.
The system carried about 380,000 people per weekday from March 2 to 6, down 8 percent from the previous week, when it carried its typical load of about 400,000 people per day.
On Monday just 301,547 passengers rode the system — lower than the average weekday ridership the system had in 2004.
Officials with other transit agencies said they did not have ridership data available Tuesday, though a Caltrain spokesman said staff on the ground have been seeing fewer customers during rush hour. The Bay Area Toll Authority did not have data immediately available showing how many cars have been crossing the region’s bridges in recent weeks, but anecdotally, traffic on Bay Area freeways has been lighter.
A mix of factors related to the virus could be to blame.
More companies, such as Facebook, Apple and Salesforce, have since joined in the push to have people work from home, meaning thousands of would-be commuters don’t have to travel. Local colleges, including Stanford, UC-Berkeley and San Jose State, have canceled in-person classes. Organizers have called off events around the Bay Area.
And even those who are still commuting may be wary about using public transit, whether because they’re among those more vulnerable populations that public health officials say should avoid large gatherings, or perhaps because they don’t want to be in close contact with other riders.
Already, many conferences, concerts, fairs, and other school and social events around the Bay Area have been cancelled, and more are being announced daily. Those cancellations, coupled with workers telecommuting, could blow a big hole in BART’s budget because it relies so heavily on fares.
The average American public transit system gets about a third of its revenue from passenger fares, but those fares acount for just over half of the funding for BART’s operations. Fares and parking combined account for $516.8 million of its $947.3 operating budget this fiscal year.
That makes the agency particularly vulnerable to declines in ridership — which had already been falling, albeit far less severely, before the virus became a concern.
Asked about how a long ridership slump might affect BART, spokeswoman Alicia Trost said, “Any dip in ridership is a financial concern. Staff is currently assessing the financial impact.”
