Coronavirus image from wikicommons

Update: Governor Jay Inslee issued a “Stay home, stay health” order, with a list of essential workers who are exempt, Monday afternoon.

It may seem like an Age ago, but it has been less than two weeks since the United Nations’ World Health Organization declared covid-19 to be a pandemic.

By the end of last week, local transit agencies had made their first move to implement social distance orders — that is, that people should stay at least 6 feet away from each other — by enabling rear door entrance and egress on all buses, and reducing contacts via fare equipment, both achieved by sacrificing any further fare collection until further notice. Only riders with mobility aids or otherwise needing to use the ramp will be permitted to use the front door.

In an act of unfortunately poor timing, significant service reductions are being implemented starting today, even before we get to see what fare freedom does for transit ridership. The end result is that social distance on buses may be much less this week than last week.

We also don’t know what ridership would have been like on Link if ST went back to the old pre-Connect-2020 schedule, which actually had a schedule. At publication time, ST has not provided a Link schedule to us for this week’s service change, but merely indicated that headway would be 14 minutes.

In another case of unfortunately poor timing, riders from freshly-truncated Metro route 255 will now be expected to transfer at UW Station, or increase crowding on other downtown-bound buses.

In one piece of good news, Metro has improved its text-for-departures program to remove cancelled runs. Text your bus stop ID # to 62550 to find out when the next bus will arrive.

Let’s crowdsource. Are your buses and trains more or less crowded than less week? Are you able to maintain social distance (6 feet) from other passengers while on transit, and while waiting for transit? Have you switched to other routes or other modes that allow you to maintain social distance? Are you prepared to bunker down at home for the next several months or maybe more than a year?

It’s beginning to look a lot like curfew

While Washington State was the earliest and hardest hit by covid-19, other states have jumped to higher levels of mandated social distancing faster.

By the end of this past weekend, the governors of California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio had all issued stay-at-home orders for their population not involved in essential jobs. Update: The governors of Colorado, Guam, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, US Virgin Islands, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin have also now issued or announced they will issue stay-at-home orders for all residents in their state who don’t have essential jobs.

Each of these states have treated transit as an essential service. However, falling ridership and added expenses for cleansing against covid-19 have created a financial emergency for transit agencies, and so emergency service reductions have become the standard practice. Moreover, New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and many other transit agencies are begging the federal government for a bailout.

The City of Wuhan, where the outbreak started, actually shut transit and most other modes of transportation down for several weeks, in order to get the virus under control. With the rest of the world treating the virus less seriously, their sacrifice might have been in vain.