Bay Area traffic is terrible, so why are fewer people taking transit?

The Bay Area needs to get a lot more people to ditch their cars and take public transportation if the region wants to free itself from mind-numbing traffic and reduce carbon emissions.

But new research shows the opposite has been happening.

Ridership across the Bay Area’s public transportation systems fell by 5.2 percent between 2016 and 2018, according to a study from UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies, with the region’s residents taking 27.5 million fewer transit trips per year.

That decline happened despite a booming local economy that should have led people to use public transit more. It may be driven, researchers found, by stiff competition from ride-hailing apps and a regional housing crisis that is pushing people into more car-dependent areas. The Bay Area needs to unwind that crisis to reverse its transit decline, they wrote, and make tough choices to give transit a leg up on driving.

The Bay Area isn’t alone — transit ridership has dropped even more dramatically across California and nationwide over the past five years.

Still, even the smaller decrease in the Bay Area points to a troubling trend for public transit agencies trying to lure people away from driving.

“Compared to the rest of the country, the Bay Area is doing better, but it is on the decline,” said Jacob Wasserman, a UCLA researcher who gave a presentation about the forthcoming study Wednesday to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. The full study is expected to be released next month.

It shows that the number of trips taken each year on the Bay Area’s public transit systems fell during the recession, then rebounded along with the economy — rising from 482.3 million in 2011 to a peak of 531.4 million by 2016. But even as the region’s economy stayed white hot, the pace of people boarding buses, trains and BART in each of the next two years did not, ending 2018 with 503.9 million trips.

The steepest ridership drops came during “off-peak” hours — on nights and weekends, when most people are not using the services to get to and from their jobs.

While the number of public transit trips during peak commute hours fell by 2.4 percent between 2016 and 2018 in the Bay Area, it dropped by 10.2 percent during noncommute hours.

As anyone who rides a packed BART train through the Transbay Tube knows, ridership also remains strong going into downtown San Francisco and other major job centers. The problem, researchers found, was that it has been declining for transit agencies that don’t serve those hubs.

“It’s trips that are not made for work,” Wasserman said in an interview, for which riders are passing on transit and may be driving instead.

The declines likely were not driven by the quality of transit service, according to the study, because agencies typically were providing more service during the years when ridership fell.

And it likely was not the result of tech-industry workers ditching transit for employee shuttles. The researchers found many of the shuttles serve areas where ridership has been increasing, such as Caltrain’s booming route between Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

Instead, the researchers pointed a finger at companies such as Uber and Lyft, which could be siphoning passengers away from public transportation, especially for those night and weekend trips when transit has seen declines and ride-hailing apps are most popular. The UCLA team cautioned, though, that it’s hard to say for sure what effect the companies are having because many don’t share detailed data about their own ridership.

Another potential cause is the ever-lengthening commutes many Bay Area residents endure to get from the affordable cities that sprawl at the region’s fringes to its expensive core.

Transit could prove slower than driving for those longer trips, Wasserman said, even at rush hour. And even if residents of less dense communities use public transportation to get to work, he said, they are more likely to drive for their weekly grocery run, night out or other trips that aren’t their commute.

“If you are outside of a dense central area, transit just isn’t competitive,” Wasserman said.

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Here are the rules for using the express lanes: Roadshow What’s the solution? Lowering ticket prices for off-peak hours could help lure some riders back, the study posited, and could also ease crowding on rush-hour trains and buses by encouraging people to commute at different hours. Dedicated lanes to get buses out of everyday traffic also could make transit much more competitive with driving.

And, of course, the UCLA researchers had the same recommendation as many who have examined and experienced the region’s housing crisis over the years: Provide housing close to job centers, so that more people can afford to live in denser areas that have better transit options.

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