About 76% of CTA riders and 80% of Metra and Pace users who stopped riding during the pandemic said they would return to public transportation, according to a survey released Thursday by the Regional Transportation Authority.
But the transportation agencies expect riding habits to be different. The survey found many riders said they expect to spend more days telecommuting than they did before the pandemic.
The survey, conducted in November and January, comes as ride-share companies say they are seeing more customers nationally. Uber reported the highest monthly companywide ride bookings in its history in March, and Lyft said in early March it had its biggest week for rider volume since the pandemic began. In Chicago, the largest increases in Uber rides have been during commuting hours and on weekends, spokesman Bobby Kellman said. Rides across all services in February, though, remained far below their pre-pandemic levels, city data shows.
Uber and Lyft said they could not immediately provide more recent Chicago-specific ride numbers.
“I think one really encouraging sign that we’ve seen is that we’ve absolutely seen an influx of new riders,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at a March 1 investor conference. “And that influx looks like it’s coming from other modes of transportation, whether it’s mass transit or taxi. Like, pretty consistently across markets, we see Uber come back faster than taxi, faster than other forms of transport.”
Eric Karas, who drives for both Uber and Lyft, said he has had more passengers heading to bars, restaurants or other homes in the past month. He also recently started to see an increase in rides to airports. He typically starts driving in the late morning and sometimes picks up a passenger heading to work in the suburbs. There haven’t been enough commuters heading downtown to convince him to return to the early morning hours he once drove, he said.
“If I’m taking someone down to the Loop, they’re usually saying, ‘oh, this is the one day a week I’m doing it,’ or ‘oh, I haven’t been back to the office since the pandemic started,’” he said.
He’s been busier than ever, he said, but much of it is likely because of a driver shortage. Facing health and safety concerns, many drivers have been slower to return. Uber last week announced incentives to woo drivers back.
In the RTA’s survey, 17% of CTA riders said they substituted a public transit trip with a ride-share or taxi trip during the pandemic, as did 5% of Metra riders. Personal vehicles were a more common substitution for public transit trips, though, and most often people said they simply didn’t make a trip they had once taken using public transit.
Near midday Wednesday, a steady stream of riders trickled into the Wilson Red Line station. Some said they’ve taken CTA buses or trains throughout the pandemic to get to work or school.
Corey Drennon recently returned to the CTA, and consistently has been riding the train three days a week since January to her job in Evanston. She prefers public transportation to a ride-share because it’s more economical, she said. “It’s so much more worth it, even with the (pandemic) safety concerns,” she said. Much of what public transit ridership looks like will depend on employer decisions about employees’ return to the office, Redden said.
Metra, which focuses heavily on commuters and has seen steep drops in riders during the pandemic, is highlighting its safety measures. The agency also is considering shifting train schedules to run throughout the day, rather than focusing on rush times, to serve employees commuting outside traditional hours and riders making nonwork trips, said spokesman Michael Gillis.
Gillis said Metra also is considering changes to its fare structure but declined to provide additional details. “We’re going to need to be very flexible, both with schedules and fares, to get our old customers back, win new customers,” he said.
The survey by RTA, which oversees planning and funding for the transportation agencies, has highlighted a need to think about access to transportation and its role in the region’s economy, Redden said. The majority of people who continued to ride CTA, Metra and Pace throughout the pandemic had a household income below $50,000. They were more likely than lapsed riders to be Black or Hispanic and required to be on-site for their jobs, the survey found.
“I think over the long haul, we’ll continue amongst us and the three service boards to think about how mobility might change around the region,” Redden said.
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