Transit's Financial Prognosis: Findings from a Survey of U.S. Transit Systems during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Public Works Management & Policy (2023)

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Research article in Public Works Management & Policy (2023), Transit's Financial Prognosis: Findings from a Survey of U.S. Transit Systems during the COVID-19 Pandemic, by Fariba Siddiq, Jacob L. Wasserman, Brian D. Taylor and Samuel Speroni of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. Drawing on two nationwide surveys of transit agency staff in 2020 and 2021-2022, the authors report that pandemic financial shortfalls affected service and delayed capital projects in 2020 but became much more muted by 2021/2022, with most systems recording moderate to substantial increases in federal funding. Nearly half foresee shortfalls once federal relief expires, particularly agencies with higher pre-pandemic ridership and farebox recovery. Difficulty hiring and retaining front-line workers was a pressing concern.

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“Transit's Financial Prognosis: Findings from a Survey of U.S. Transit Systems during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Public Works Management & Policy (2023).” Original at pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Archived at Pandemic Darlings, https://pandemicdarlings.com/source-documents/transit-s-financial-prognosis-findings-from-a-survey-of-u-s-transit-sy-5c6847f06b/, SHA-256 256996a3a2f6a4b85d7f385c647395036e8db9febef2e413f525f24cdedfe0fa.

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Research & Theory

Public Works Management & Policy
2023, Vol. 0(0) 1–23
Transit’s Financial Prognosis: © The Author(s) 2023

Findings from a Survey of U.S. Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Transit Systems during the DOI: 10.1177/1087724X231160097
journals.sagepub.com/home/pwm
COVID-19 Pandemic

Fariba Siddiq1,2 , Jacob L. Wasserman2 ,
Brian D. Taylor1,2 , and Samuel Speroni1,2 

Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic occasioned signiﬁcant ﬁnancial distress and uncertainty for
many U.S. transit operators. In the face of this crisis, the federal government provided
substantial supplemental operating support. To understand how this ﬁscal turmoil and
relief have affected U.S. transit systems, we conducted two nationwide surveys of
transit agency staff in 2020 and 2021-2022. While pandemic-induced ﬁnancial shortfalls
affected service in 2020, with capital projects delayed too, these effects became much
more muted by 2021/2022. Most systems reported moderate to substantial increases
in federal funding during the pandemic, more so than other funding categories.
However, nearly half foresee ﬁnancial shortfalls once federal relief funding expires.
Agencies with higher pre-pandemic ridership and farebox recovery are particularly
affected by fare revenue losses and more likely to anticipate shortfalls. In the near term,
difﬁculty hiring and retaining front-line workers was a pressing concern, while very few
had plans to maintain pandemic fare suspensions.

Keywords
transportation, public transit, infrastructure planning, transit ﬁnance, COVID-19,
federal stimulus

1
UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2
UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:
Brian D. Taylor, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, 337
Charles E. Young Drive East, Public Affairs Building 3320G, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Email: btaylor@ucla.edu
2 Public Works Management & Policy 0(0)

Introduction
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic upended the public transit
industry globally. U.S. transit ridership fell precipitously early on and, as of 2022, had
only partially and unevenly recovered, with commuter-oriented lines and systems
struggling the most. Consequently, fare revenues fell sharply, which hit systems with
previously high farebox recovery ratios (the share of operating expenses covered by
fares) hardest (Parker et al., 2021; TransitCenter, 2020b).
While all forms of travel declined at the onset of the pandemic, transit use was
depressed much more than other means of transportation; ridership plummeted more
sharply at the onset of the pandemic, and recovered far more slowly since then. Public
transit systems in the U.S. lost from 50 to better than 90 percent of their riders early on
(FTA, 2022). Despite the relaxation of most health-related restrictions by 2022 and the
reopening of schools, businesses, and economic activities, transit ridership, in general,
remained depressed. To make ﬁnancial matters worse, many agencies suspended fare
collection for the ﬁrst three to nine months of the pandemic to limit passenger/operator
interactions and reduce the likelihood of infection (EBP U.S., 2020).
The precipitous declines in patronage early in the pandemic followed a half-decade
of gradually falling ridership, amidst gradually rising service. Passengers per transit
vehicle service hour declined by 12.1 percent in the U.S. between 2014 and 2019
(Dickens, 2021)—years during which, unlike many prior transit ridership downturns,
the U.S. experienced sustained economic growth. Bus services tended to lose sub-
stantially more riders than rail, with losses dating back longer as well, though both
modes generally lost passengers on most systems. While suggested culprits for these
pre-pandemic declines, such as increasing passenger concerns with safety and eroding
service reliability contributed, research generally found that increased car access—both
in the form of rapid uptake of ridehail services like Lyft and Uber and increased
personal vehicle ownership—was principally responsible (Erhardt et al., 2022;
Manville et al., 2018, 2023). During this pre-pandemic period, falling ridership meant
falling fare revenues, while revenues from other federal, state, and local sources were
generally robust amidst the booming economy. But the COVID-19 pandemic, at least
initially, affected almost all facets of society and government, including the other
regular funding sources for transit.
Amidst stay-at-home orders and layoffs, the spring 2020 economic slowdown
threatened most tax revenue sources whose losses, collectively, imperiled the ability of
many systems to continue operating. On top of this, expenses increased, due to
pandemic-related costs of heightened cleaning, retroﬁtting vehicles to improve air
ﬁltration, shielding vehicle operators from passengers (APTA Cleaning and
Disinfecting Vehicles and Facilities Technical Advisory Group, 2020), and overtime
pay to workers substituting for other staff out sick. Just weeks into the pandemic, the
TransitCenter (TransitCenter, 2020b) estimated the annual ﬁnancial shortfall across
U.S. transit agencies would total between $26 and $40 billion. The American Public
Transportation Association (APTA) similarly predicted in a May 2020 report that
Siddiq et al. 3

transit agencies would experience, absent government rescue funding, $48.8 billion in
revenue losses from April 2020 through the end of 2021 (EBP U.S., 2020).
In response to these ﬁnancial crises, the federal government committed unprece-
dented public resources to support transit operations in three separate bills in a little
over a year. According to transit agency leaders, these bills kept systems aﬂoat and
allowed them to avoid severe service and workforce cuts (Wasserman et al., 2022). In
addition, after initial dips, most state and local tax revenue sources quickly bounced
back over the second half of 2020 as the economy churned back to life (King et al.,
2021, 2023). Despite initially dire predictions, through government intervention and
macroeconomic forces, transit survived the pandemic.
Yet even with massive federal aid and the recovery of many revenue sources, the
ﬁscal effects of the pandemic on transit agencies have lingered. Projections from
2022 foresaw a funding gap of $519 million in Fiscal Year 2024 for the Washington
Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in the District of Columbia and a $236 million
deﬁcit in the same year for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in Boston
(Blumgart, 2022).
Against this backdrop of crisis and halting recovery, this paper examines the ﬁscal
past, present, and future of public transit systems in the U.S., with a focus on how the
turmoil brought about by the pandemic has affected transit systems in myriad ways. To
inform this research, we conducted two nationwide surveys of transit agency staff, in
August, September, and October of 2020 (about six months into the pandemic) and
again in November 2021 to January 2022 (about 21 months into the pandemic), to
understand the ﬁscal and operational challenges they have faced and are facing as the
pandemic has evolved, the strategies they have adopted to cope with these challenges,
and their ﬁscal and operational plans for the future.

Context
Transit in the Pandemic
At the onset of the pandemic, transit ridership collapsed across the U.S. (and, indeed,
around much of the globe) because of stay-at-home orders and fear of virus trans-
mission while riding transit. Transit agencies quickly adopted various health-related
measures, such as regular, intensive vehicle cleaning; improved ventilation and air
ﬁltration; masking requirements; blocking off some seats to allow for distancing;
eliminating fares, fare enforcement, and/or cash transactions for ticket sales; enforcing
social distancing through vehicle capacity restrictions and rear-door only boarding and
alighting (to minimize contact with vehicle operators); and physical barriers between
operators and passengers (Speroni et al., 2023). Many of these measures were later
relaxed with increased understanding of the virus and how it spreads, but the capital and
operating costs of maintaining some pandemic-related improvements and services have
persisted on many systems.
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Those who continued to ride public transit during the early periods of the pandemic
were disproportionately poorer, women, and essential workers and less likely white or
Asian (Paul & Taylor, 2022; TransitCenter, 2020c; Transit App, 2020), a shift that
garnered elevated public and media attention amidst the racial reckoning following the
murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020. While ridership rebounded somewhat as
the pandemic evolved, patronage remained well below pre-pandemic numbers on most
systems in 2022. Overall transit ridership across U.S. transit agencies in the ﬁrst quarter
of 2022 hovered at around 54 percent of ridership in the fourth quarter of 2019
(Dickens, 2022a). Metropolitan areas with higher median household incomes, more
college-educated residents, higher employment rates, and greater shares of Asian
residents were more likely to have deeper losses in ridership than other areas (Qi et al.,
2021). Commuter-oriented lines and systems, in particular, had steeper and more
sustained ridership declines than other transit systems, given the increasing trend of
remote and hybrid work during the pandemic (especially among higher–income
workers and commuters) (Calvert & Vielkind, 2022). These ridership declines, along
with fare suspensions by many agencies early in the pandemic, combined to cause huge
losses in fare revenues during the pandemic’s ﬁrst two years.
As agencies struggled with ridership, they also faced workforce challenges. Early
on, illness and leave to care for sick loved ones kept many bus and rail operators from
behind the wheel. But after a brief period when many transit operators struggled to
avoid worker layoffs in the face of ridership collapse and associated service cutbacks,
most U.S. transit systems since then have struggled to recruit and retain bus operators,
train operators, and mechanics as the economy roared back to life in the second half of
2020 and into 2022. This labor shortage was exacerbated by hiring or wage freezes
implemented earlier in the pandemic and wages either remaining stagnant or increasing
slower than inﬂation and cost of living. Enforcing fare requirements and mask
mandates by passengers has further added stresses for vehicle operators and may have
motivated some to shift to jobs, such as truck driving, that do not require policing
customer behaviors (Perrero, 2022; Van Eyken, 2022). Per a March 2022 APTA survey,
92 percent of agencies nationally reported having difﬁculty hiring, two-thirds are
having difﬁculty retaining employees, and 71 percent have had to cut service or delay
service increases as a result of workforce issues (Dickens, 2022b).
As a result of falling patronage, labor shortages, and associated ﬁnancial shortfalls,
almost all U.S. transit agencies operated service in 2022 below pre-pandemic levels
(Dickens, 2022a). These service cuts most affected those with limited or no access to
cars, who rely on transit for their day-to-day mobility needs and who are dispro-
portionately low-income, immigrants, and people of color (Begley et al., 2022; He
et al., 2022).
While some of the pandemic-induced repercussions for transit are likely short-
lived, recent surveys and data from transit agencies suggest that depressed ridership
may well endure (Dickens, 2022a; Parker et al., 2021; Shamshiripour et al., 2020). To
adapt to a “new normal” of diminished and shifted rider demand, many transit
agencies have begun to pursue various strategies to lure riders back, such as reducing,
Siddiq et al. 5

capping, or even eliminating fares; redesigning routes to reﬂect shifting patterns of
demand; adjusting schedules and extending service during off-peak hours and
weekends as traditional peak-period demand has shrunk; selling new two- or three-
day-per-week passes targeted at people working hybrid schedules; and offering riders
various perks and rewards (Bergal, 2022). While pandemic-induced declines in
patronage and responses to them have been generally well-covered in the scholarly
literature to date, the ﬁnancial condition of the U.S. transit industry has received far
less attention from researchers, and in particular how these conditions have evolved
over the course of the pandemic.

Government Crisis Responses and Transit’s Outlook
To avert the ﬁnancial collapse of public transit systems nationwide, the federal
government committed unprecedented public resources to support transit systems large
and small. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, passed
in March 2020 only weeks into the pandemic in the U.S., provided $25 billion for
public transit systems (FTA, 2021a). This inﬂux of funding prevented draconian cuts in
service and personnel at most systems, but given the depth of early pandemic losses in
fare revenue and other state and local funding and the increased costs associated with
equipping vehicles and personnel for pandemic operations, many transit agencies
quickly burned through their CARES funds. New York’s transit system expected to be
out of CARES funding by the end of July 2020, and an analysis by the TransitCenter
found that funding for the 10 largest U.S. transit agencies would only last roughly three
to six months (though smaller agencies, which typically received proportionally more
funding, would be able to hold out for longer) (TransitCenter, 2020a).
In late December 2020, Congress passed the Coronavirus Response and Relief
Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act, which earmarked another $14 billion for
transit (FTA, 2021b). This bill, which again largely prevented severe service cuts and
layoffs at transit agencies, was intended by its legislative authors as reprieve but not an
ongoing rescue (Bliss, 2020). The two 2020 federal relief bills alone provided ﬁnancial
support to U.S. transit systems equal to roughly half of all U.S. transit operating
expenditures in 2018 (Mallett & Goldman, 2020). Less than three months later, the new
Biden administration pushed through the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act, which
included an additional $31 billion for transit (USDOT, 2021; Wanek-Libman, 2021).
So, in one year, the U.S. government provided public transit systems with nearly
$70 billion in additional funding to cover pandemic-related revenue losses. These bills
represented a sea change for federal transit funding: while the federal government has
long provided primarily capital support for transit infrastructure projects, this sub-
stantial operational support was both new (save for some prior operating support for
small and rural agencies) and deemed necessary during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, state and local revenue sources proved more resilient than was feared
early on. For instance, revenue from local option sales taxes for transportation in
California, a major source of transit operating and capital funding in the state, recovered
6 Public Works Management & Policy 0(0)

relatively quickly after an initial drop. Supported by federal assistance to households, a
general recovery of spending, especially for goods, and the taxation of online sales,
these tax revenues strengthened in 2021 and exceeded pre-pandemic monthly receipts
in 2022 (King et al., 2021, 2023).
Despite federal assistance and other funding sources rebounding, many transit
agencies still face or anticipate a “ﬁscal cliff.” With ofﬁce work slow to return in many
central business districts, formerly high farebox-recovery systems (often larger,
commuter, and/or rail operators) face the most substantial ongoing rider and fare
revenue losses. Service cuts and fare increases have not proven sufﬁcient to avert
projected future losses at such agencies (Blumgart, 2022). So, while the substantial
three-time federal assistance helped transit agencies to weather the initial and most
profound crises early in the pandemic, ﬁnancial uncertainties lie ahead. The $1.2 trillion
federal infrastructure bill signed into law by President Biden in November 2021
provides substantial new funding for U.S. transit systems, but unlike the three federal
pandemic relief bills, this new funding is primarily limited to capital improvements and
cannot be used for operating support (Bergal, 2022).
Against this broad backdrop of traumatic changes and profound ﬁscal uncertainties
for the transit industry, we know less about how challenges vary across the nation’s
myriad transit systems, how the agencies have responded to them, and what they think
lies ahead. Further, while the ﬁscal state of transit received popular and some scholarly
attention during the tumultuous early days of the pandemic, we know far less about how
transit systems are faring ﬁnancially later in the pandemic. To paint this more nuanced
picture of pandemic transit ﬁnance in the U.S., we turn now to our surveys of transit
systems.

Methods
We conducted two national surveys of U.S. transit operators, the ﬁrst in the late summer
and early fall of 2020 and the second in the winter of 2021–2022 —representing, to our
knowledge, the only multi-wave ﬁnancial survey of transit operators during the
pandemic. We created a stratiﬁed random sample of 200 transit agencies in the U.S.,
drawn from the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA’s) National Transit Database
(NTD). We selected these 200 agencies from the 1657 standard general public transit
operators in the NTD (excluding private providers, tribes, universities, agencies on
aging, and assets) in the then-most-recent year of data (Report Year 2018). From these,
we delineated a sampling frame using a random number generator that ﬁt both of the
following criteria (subject to rounding):

1. We selected agencies to address the asymmetry between agency numbers and
boardings. In the full NTD dataset, the smallest 80 percent of agencies ac-
counted for just two percent of boardings, while the largest eight agencies
accounted for nearly 60 percent of boardings. Thus, to ensure both small
agencies (of which there are many) and their boardings (of which there are few)
Siddiq et al. 7

as well as large agencies (few) and their riders (many) were represented in the
survey, we divided the agencies into seven strata by a combination of numbers of
agencies and boardings (See Table 1). Our goal in stratifying our sampling frame
in this way was to ensure agencies of all sizes were represented in the survey and
to avoid the likelihood that the few large agencies might have been crowded out
by the many small agencies.
2. The sampling frame was also stratiﬁed geographically by FTA region. But just
as boardings are asymmetrically distributed across agencies, so too are agencies
and boardings asymmetrically distributed across regions. To again achieve a
balance, we created a score for each region, three-fourths of which was the
region’s share of all U.S. agencies and one-fourth of which was the region’s
share of U.S. transit boardings. We selected the sampling frame such that the
number of selected agencies from each region was proportionate to that score.

Given the huge asymmetry in ridership between the nation’s largest and smallest
operators, as well as geographic differences, the aim of this procedure was to create a
sample representative of both U.S. transit ridership and U.S. transit systems, to a fair
degree each.
We identiﬁed staff contacts at each of these agencies from online searches of agency
websites, employee directories, and documents; from APTA and other industry contact
lists; and from communications with staff themselves. Where available, we sent the
survey to planning, ﬁnance, and operations staff at each agency, as identiﬁed by job
title; for smaller agencies or those with less information available online, we sent the
survey to general management. We invited each of the identiﬁed staff to ﬁll out the
survey themselves or to collaborate with or send it to others in their agency with the best
knowledge of the issues asked about in it, allowing only one response per agency. The
ﬁrst wave of this survey, which focused on the onset of the pandemic and transit agency
responses to it, was open from August 2020 through early October of 2020. The second
wave of the survey, which focused more explicitly on ﬁnancial issues, was open from

Table 1. Sample Stratiﬁcation by Agency Counts and Agency Ridership.

Target Agencies in
Stratum Report Year 2018 Boardings Total U.S. Transit Agencies Sampling Frame

1 >500 mil. 1 1
2 225-500 mil. 7 7
3 75-225 mil. 14 12
4 25-75 mil. 22 15
5 10-25 mil. 45 25
6 1-10 mil. 237 60
7 <1 mil. 1331 80
Supplemental data source: (FTA, 2022)
8 Public Works Management & Policy 0(0)

November 2021 to January 2022. Respondents were eligible to receive a gift card for
completing the survey. In both surveys, we coincidentally received 56 responses out of
200 solicitations (See Figure 1), for a response rate of 28 percent. As not all submitted
surveys contained responses to all of the questions posed, we note the total number of
respondents for each question in the results section.
The ﬁrst wave of the survey covered a wide array of topics, including service
planning, operations, labor, public health, equity, performance measurements and
crowding data, and communications (See Speroni et al. (2023) for more on the non-
ﬁnance ﬁndings from this ﬁrst wave). In the second wave, the questionnaire asked
about ways the pandemic affected agency ﬁnances, fare revenues and policies, and
longer-term planning, as well as changes to transit service and operations made because
of the pandemic’s budgetary effects or with implications for agency budgets.
We compare the ﬁndings of the two waves of the survey through a repeated cross-
sectional comparison—samples from the population of transit agencies at two periods
of time—and a longitudinal comparison for the 29 agencies that responded to both
iterations of the survey. In these two ways, we compare summer/fall 2020 to fall 2021/
winter 2022, two very different points in the pandemic.
We examine how the repercussions of the pandemic varied across systems with
respect to their pre-pandemic ridership, farebox recovery ratios, and the modes they
operate. In order to do so, we complement our survey results with additional data from
the NTD on boardings, fares, and operating expenses (FTA, 2022). We also use the data
from our survey to analyze patterns by the modes of transit service operated by
agencies. We only note our ﬁndings by mode, ridership, and farebox recovery for select
survey questions where warranted. Across the two samples, a similar share of agencies

Figure 1. Responding Agencies. Supplemental data source: (Hudson, 2017).
Siddiq et al. 9

operate each mode: 20 percent in 2020 and 18 percent in 2021/2022 operated rail,
96 percent in 2020 and in 2021/2022 operated buses, and 80 percent in 2020 and
86 percent in 2021/2022 operated paratransit.
Finally, while we sought a representative sample for our two survey waves, we
cannot be certain that our results accurately reﬂect the experiences at all U.S. transit
agencies. For example, it is possible that staff at agencies experiencing more pandemic-
induced change might have been more likely to complete our surveys than those whose
operations were affected less. On the other hand, it may be that staff at agencies
struggling more with the effects of the pandemic might be less likely to respond, even if
anonymously, out of a reluctance to dwell on their agency’s struggles or a lack of
available time to respond. In addition, it could be that those who did respond were more
likely to portray an overly positive situation and outlook for their agency. As the history
of cost forecasting of transit projects by industry professionals shows, any attempt to
predict the ﬁscal future of transit needs to tread carefully (Flyvbjerg et al., 2002).
Nonetheless, those working with transit budgets daily have a particularly acute sense of
their systems’ strengths, weaknesses, and needs, and surveying them about topics such
as their plans for future operating expenditures, capital investments, fare policies, and
the like can reveal coming trends in ways that budget documents cannot. Lastly, we
received a greater share of surveys answered in California than elsewhere, potentially
due to the existing connections between our California-based research team and the
state’s transit agencies or to those agencies’ staffs’ greater propensity to respond to a
survey from an in-state university.

Results
Financial Effects of the Pandemic on Service and Capital Projects
Service Responses. As press reports and literature discussed above would suggest, the
pandemic had a substantial effect on the service provided by many of the agencies in
our survey sample. In our later 2021/2022 survey, about half (49%) of responding
agencies reported that their service in November 2021, well over a year and a half into
the pandemic, was still somewhat or signiﬁcantly lower than prior to the pandemic
(n = 45).
Faced with numerous pandemic challenges, transit operators reported adjusting their
service patterns more often and more substantially than before the pandemic. Thirty-six
percent of agencies in our 2021/2022 survey modiﬁed their service much more fre-
quently since the onset of the pandemic, and another 36 percent reported adjusting
service somewhat more frequently (n = 45). In terms of the magnitude of those service
changes, 31 percent of agencies responded that the pandemic made those adjustments
substantially larger in scale; 40 percent reported that the pandemic affected the scale of
their service changes to some extent (n = 45).
To adapt to changing rider demand, labor shortages, and ﬁnancial shortfalls, transit
operators adopted various strategies, such as adjusting off-peak weekday service hours
10 Public Works Management & Policy 0(0)

both up and down, adding capacity through new contracted services, expanding or
contracting geographic service area coverage, increasing or decreasing service
headways, eliminating and/or consolidating lines/routes, changing peak-hour weekday
service hours, and moving to traditional Saturday or Sunday service on all days. Among
these, changing service headways/frequency, peak-hour weekday service hours, and
off-peak weekday service hours were the most common strategies adopted by the
agencies, with 59 percent, 57 percent, and 52 percent of agencies doing each, re-
spectively, at some point during the pandemic (n = 44) (See Figure 2).
However, most respondents (58%) told us that they did not anticipate that many of
these various service changes would be permanent (n = 45). Those that did enact
permanent service changes reported doing so mostly in response to longer-lasting shifts
in passenger demand.

Service Changes No Longer Driven by Finances. To what degree were all these service
changes driven by ﬁnancial exigencies? Of course, completely untangling related
issues like labor and public health from ﬁnance is impossible, but we found a marked
shift in the degree to which budgets steered transit service decisions as the pandemic
wore on. In our earlier 2020 survey, nearly half of the responding agencies told us that
ﬁnancial shortfalls were affecting their service, with 21 percent reporting that service
was affected more than a moderate amount (n = 56). With ridership still near nadirs due

Figure 2. Pandemic Service Responses, Either Current or Rescinded, Fall 2021/Winter 2022.
Note: Respondents that skipped the question are excluded.
Siddiq et al. 11

to business closures, fear of infection, and public health orders, agencies were still
grappling with sharp declines in fare revenue at the time of the ﬁrst survey. At that
moment, only one of the three federal stimulus bills had passed, and the degree to which
subsidies from other levels of government would recover was not yet clear.
Enduring changes in service, though, were decreasingly a result of agency ﬁnances
by late 2021/early 2022. By the time of our second survey, only one in ﬁve re-
spondents reported that their services were being affected by ﬁnancial shortfalls (n =
47). A longitudinal comparison of responses from agencies that completed both
surveys offers similar insights: 41 percent saw their service affected by ﬁnancial
shortfalls in 2020, compared to just 10 percent in 2021/2022. Though labor issues
(discussed below), continued illnesses, supply chain problems, and more caused
transit policymakers to cut or adjust service in 2022 (Wasserman et al., 2022), severe
budgetary constraints were no longer a primary factor.
The effects of ﬁnancial shortfalls on agencies’ services varied based on agency
characteristics. Systems with higher pre-pandemic farebox recovery ratios reported
service being particularly affected by agency ﬁnances. The agencies that responded that
ﬁnancial shortfalls were affecting their current services “a great deal” in our fall 2021/
winter 2022 survey had an average pre-pandemic farebox recovery ratio of 32 percent,
while agencies whose services were not affected by ﬁnancial shortfalls had average pre-
pandemic farebox ratios of just 12 percent.

Capital Projects. As with operations, transit capital projects likewise bore the ﬁnancial
and logistical effects of the pandemic early on but saw these lessen over time. In our
2020 survey, about half of respondents had capital projects delayed due to the pandemic
(n = 49), while by fall 2021/winter 2022, that ﬁgure had dropped to three in ten (n = 45).
A much larger share of agencies in the fall 2021/winter 2022 survey told us that their
capital projects have either been unaffected (49%) or were even accelerated (18%) (See
Figure 3). This pattern did not vary by the modes the agencies operate. Forty-seven
percent of agencies that operate buses (n = 43), 43 percent of agencies that operate rail
(n = 7), and 54 percent of agencies that operate paratransit (n = 39) in our 2021/
2022 sample reported their capital projects to be unaffected.
Among agencies that responded to both survey waves, about 20 percent shifted from
being uncertain about the effects of the pandemic on their capital projects or having
projects delayed during 2020 to having their projects underway or accelerated by fall
2021/winter 2022 (n = 29) (See Figure 4).
In contrast to our ﬁndings that large, high farebox-recovery systems were more
likely to have faced operating shortfalls affecting service, longer-term capital planning
at larger agencies was less likely to have been disrupted by the pandemic. The
16 percent of respondents whose capital planning remained “relatively unaffected” in
2021/2022 because projects were already underway were larger, on average, with an
average annual pre-pandemic ridership of 57 million and with a modest average farebox
recovery ratio of 14 percent. Meanwhile, the 31 percent of systems with delayed
projects in 2021/2022 had an average annual pre-pandemic patronage of 11 million and
12 Public Works Management & Policy 0(0)

Figure 3. Has the Pandemic Affected Longer-term Capital Planning? Repeated Cross-sectional
Comparison. Note: Respondents each year that skipped the question are excluded.

Figure 4. Has the Pandemic Affected Longer-term Capital Planning? Longitudinal Comparison
of Changes over Time at 29 Agencies.
Siddiq et al. 13

a farebox recovery ratio of 10 percent, and agencies that had projects canceled (9%)
averaged fewer than one million annual boardings and a farebox recovery ratio of ﬁve
percent (though the few agencies with accelerated projects during the pandemic—due
to less trafﬁc on roads for a period, more down time for maintenance of vehicles, etc.—
were generally small and medium-sized).

Effects of the Pandemic on Transit Funding
Fares. The pandemic affected not just transit agencies’ service outputs, but their various
ﬁnancial inputs as well. Across all funding categories, fare revenues suffered the starkest
and most direct negative effects of the pandemic. On top of ridership (and thus fare
payments) falling dramatically during the pandemic, 65 percent of surveyed agencies
suspended fare collection and 18 percent stopped fare enforcement for at least some
period. However, most of these fare suspensions had ended by the time of our second
survey. Fully two-thirds (66%) of responding agencies in fall 2021/winter 2022 reported
collecting fares as they had before the pandemic (n = 50), compared to just over a third
(37%) in summer/fall 2020 (n = 51) (See Figure 5). This varied little by mode: 80 percent
of bus-operating agencies (n = 46), 90 percent of rail-operating agencies (n = 10), and
83 percent of paratransit-operating agencies (n = 42) reported a return to full fare
collection by fall 2021/winter 2022. We found the same pattern of returning to

Figure 5. Changes to General Fare Policy: Repeated Cross-sectional Comparison. Note:
Respondents each year that skipped the question are excluded.
14 Public Works Management & Policy 0(0)

pre-pandemic fare collection policies among the 29 agencies that responded to both of our
surveys, which allowed us to track these agencies’ changes in fare policy over the course
of the pandemic (See Figure 6).
The substantial majority of agencies that returned to their pre-pandemic fare policies
tended to be larger by annual ridership and more dependent on fare revenues pre-
pandemic than the minority of systems that, as of the second survey, were still operating
under modiﬁed fare policies (See Table 2). These larger systems are more likely to have
depended to a greater degree on relatively more afﬂuent commuters.
Despite most agencies’ return to their pre-pandemic fare policies, depressed fare
revenues remained common across the industry due to lagging ridership. All of the
responding agencies that collected fares prior to the pandemic reported a decline in fare
revenue and farebox recovery ratio in the fall of 2021 compared to before the pandemic.
Our survey respondents reported adopting various strategies to cope
with lost fare revenues. Four out of ﬁve in fall 2021/winter 2022 sought and/or used
additional federal, state, regional/local tax revenue sources to backﬁll for fare revenue
losses (n = 30). Over a third (37%) cut service, and another 13 percent of agencies cut
administrative or other costs, to help make up for lost fares.

Stimulus Successes. For all the doom and gloom of fare losses, the survey responses
revealed the critical importance of federal operating funds for U.S. transit agencies

Figure 6. Changes to General Fare Policy: Longitudinal Comparison of Changes over Time at
29 Agencies.
Siddiq et al. 15

Table 2. Fare Policies and Associated Agency Ridership and Farebox Recovery Ratio.

Average Farebox
November 2021 Fare Policy Average Pre-pandemicAnnual Ridership Recovery Ratio

No change from pre-pandemic 116.3 mil. 16%
Fares have been reduced 4.3 mil. 6%
Fares are no longer collected 3.5 mil. 9%
Supplemental data source: (FTA, 2022)

during the pandemic. Federal stimulus dollars provided signiﬁcant support to
agencies to stave off dire ﬁnancial situations. A remarkable 83 percent of responding
agencies reported receiving more federal subsidies during the pandemic than the year
before the pandemic—64 percent “much more” (n = 53). State, regional, or local
subsidies, by contrast, either remained roughly the same or were lower in November
2021 than the year before the pandemic, for most agencies (See Figure 7).
Larger agencies by pre-pandemic ridership, in particular, reported receiving “much
more” federal subsidies during the pandemic than prior: the agencies that received
“much more” in federal subsidies in 2021 than before the pandemic had an average
annual ridership of 119 million, those that received “somewhat more” carried
4.2 million, and those that received “about the same” had an average of just 1.5 million.
However, growth in federal subsidies occurred across all modes: 61 percent of re-
sponding agencies that operate bus services (n = 51), 70 percent of agencies operating
rail services (n = 10), and 65 percent of agencies operating paratransit services (n = 46)
reported receiving “much more” in federal subsidies in 2021.
Among its other ﬂexible provisions, the stimulus funding has relatively few re-
strictions on when it can be spent. As of the fall 2021/winter 2022, only six percent of
respondents reported that their agency had already spent down all of their federal
pandemic stimulus funds, while the rest said that their funds were still being spent
down or held in reserve (n = 53). Nearly a quarter of responding agencies indicated
that their federal rescue funding would be fully expended during the (then-) current
ﬁscal year ending in 2022, and another 40 percent foresaw it running out sometime
during the 2022-2023 ﬁscal year. Around one in ﬁve planned for it to last beyond
then. The pandemic federal stimulus funds thus not only helped keep transit budgets
aloft during the ﬁrst year of the pandemic but will end up supporting transit for several
years after.

Uncertain Outlooks. The relatively rosy ﬁscal picture painted by responses to our
questions on the stimulus faded when many respondents were asked about their
agency’s future. The respondents in our sample were divided in their prospects for their
agency’s ﬁnancial future once the federal pandemic relief funding expires. Neatly
divided, 47 percent anticipated no ﬁnancial shortfalls once federal relief funding
16 Public Works Management & Policy 0(0)

Figure 7. Subsidies during the Pandemic, as Compared to before the Pandemic, Fall 2021/
Winter 2022. Note: Respondents that skipped the question are excluded.

expires, while another 47 percent foresaw either minor or major ﬁnancial shortfalls
thereafter (n = 51). Again, systems anticipating major deﬁcits tended to be larger (on
average, 270 million passengers per year pre-pandemic) and to have had a higher
farebox recovery ratio (on average, 24%). In contrast, respondents who told us that
ﬁnancial shortfalls “probably” or “deﬁnitely” will not occur had an average annual pre-
pandemic ridership of just eight million and farebox recovery ratio of nine percent. The
majority of agencies that operate buses and/or paratransit anticipated no shortfalls once
federal relief funding expires, while rail-operating agencies were more divided:
50 percent anticipated ﬁnancial shortfalls and 40 percent did not (n = 10).
Whatever the reality or degree of coming budgetary shortfalls, most respondents did
not see it affecting service in the near term. Forty-six percent of respondents in fall
2021/winter 2022 told us that their agency’s ﬁnancial condition would not affect service
provision in the 2022-2023 ﬁscal year, and another 28 percent expected minor increases
in services (n = 46).
Meanwhile, after an unplanned experiment in fareless transit for many transit
agencies, most surveyed systems are not considering continuing fare-free policies.
Fourteen percent, though, told us in the second survey that they had decided to go fare-
free on an ongoing basis (n = 43) (although online searches since then reveal that, as of
writing, all of these agencies either continue to publicly characterize fare suspensions as
temporary or have reinstated fares), with one agency keeping its pandemic-adopted
“honor system” for fare payment, ﬁve percent reducing fares from pre-pandemic levels,
and seven percent increasing fares from pre-pandemic levels (n = 41).
Siddiq et al. 17

Labor Issues. Our ﬁndings above show that by 2022, while ﬁnances were generally not
hampering service, operations, or capital projects, labor issues were. While the
medium-term ﬁnancial future for transit may be murky, a clear, overarching concern
among transit agencies across the U.S. in our second survey was not necessarily ﬁ-
nancial shortfalls but labor shortages. Better than nine in ten (91%) agencies surveyed
expressed concerns about ﬁlling in open positions, particularly for bus/train operators
and mechanics (n = 45). Over 70 percent indicated that they are having “great dif-
ﬁculty” in ﬁlling openings. This difﬁculty was common in our sample among both
unionized and non-unionized workforces and among agencies that directly employ
their front-line workers and those that contract with private operators (which in turn
employ workers) for service, though a slightly lower share, 55 percent, of the
11 agencies with a directly employed, non-unionized workforce reported “great dif-
ﬁculty” in ﬁlling positions. As we discuss below, labor issues in the transit sector are not
new, but they have thus become particularly salient as agencies try to recover from the
pandemic.

Discussion and Conclusion
U.S. public transit systems stood, for the most part, on relatively solid ﬁscal ground in
2022, but the future is far from secure, especially for formerly high-ridership, high-
farebox-recovery systems. Patronage on most systems remains depressed, those still
riding are more likely low-income, people of color, and to have few or no household
vehicles (Paul & Taylor, 2022), fare revenues are down, and workers are hard to ﬁnd.
As we expected, the effects of COVID-19 and its repercussions on transit systems
varied between (about) six and 21 months into the pandemic. Early on, service shifted
and contracted in response to falling demand and revenues. Our survey results show
that by early 2022, service provision below pre-pandemic levels was much more likely
due to chronic labor shortages among operators and mechanics than to funding
shortfalls. While the fate of capital projects was more uncertain early on, by the time of
our fall 2021/winter 2022 survey, capital projects were more likely to have been
accelerated than delayed or abandoned.
Overall, federal stimulus funds proved a godsend for transit operators, ﬁlling holes
in other revenue sources and providing stability in an extraordinarily difﬁcult time for
the industry. Indeed, many of our respondents were able to bank and gradually spend
federal pandemic operating funds three or more years after their initial allocation to help
cover for lagging fare revenues. The federal response to the transit ﬁscal crisis early in
the pandemic is a notable example of successful public policy intervention, as the
potential ﬁnancial collapse of many U.S. transit systems was averted. But the relatively
sanguine ﬁnancial picture in 2022 does not necessarily hold for the future, at least not
for all operators. Our survey respondents were evenly divided about their agency’s
ﬁnancial prospects once the federal pandemic funds are eventually exhausted. In
general, managers at larger transit systems with higher pre-pandemic farebox recovery
18 Public Works Management & Policy 0(0)

rates are more likely to see troubled ﬁscal waters on the horizon, while those at smaller,
lower farebox-recovery systems are more optimistic about the future.
The ﬁnding that formerly “high-performing,” high-farebox-recovery systems that
long drew substantial shares of their operating revenues from fares now ﬁnd themselves
in more ﬁnancially precarious positions than “lower-performing” systems that never
relied heavily on fare income poses a dilemma for policymakers. Should state, regional,
and local operating subsidies be tied to transit systems’ abilities to attract paying
customers, or should transit’s social service role of providing mobility for many of the
most disadvantaged travelers (Taylor & Morris, 2015) irrespective of fare revenue be
emphasized? Analyses prior to the pandemic suggest that a suite of efﬁciency and
effectiveness metrics and peer-group comparisons, beyond farebox recovery ratio,
would better align transit funding to the goals policymakers typically set for transit
(Gahbauer et al., 2019). Given that so many systems suspended fare collection during
the pandemic, some advocates have called for systems to go “fare-free” on an ongoing
basis to both attract riders back to transit and to relieve ﬁnancial burdens on disad-
vantaged riders. While some systems reported being or going fare-free during the
pandemic, a substantial majority returned to collecting fares.
Meanwhile, labor issues loom large over transit’s recovery. Yet, though the pan-
demic surely worsened this situation, an industry-wide labor shortage has hampered the
smooth delivery of transit service for years. Vehicle operators in particular have proven
hard to keep and even harder to recruit. The arduous nature of the job requires operating
a large vehicle safely and efﬁciently; keeping customers of all stripes moving, pro-
tected, and happy; and defusing confrontations—all during long, non-standard, and/or
strictly scheduled shifts. Despite some agencies increasing wages and bonuses, our
survey conﬁrms recent reports of agencies not being able to attract sufﬁcient operators
to ﬁll open positions, perhaps due as well to inﬂation and competition from other
industries (George, 2021; Kamisher, 2021; Van Eyken, 2022). While labor conditions
and availability proximately represent an operational concern, they often stem ulti-
mately from budgetary decisions and agency ﬁnances.
All of these near-term ﬁnancial concerns, in our view, are prompted by longer-term
existential ones. Will rider demand and fare revenues remain depressed well into the
future? Will increased federal, state, or local support step in to ﬁll the gap? Will
traditionally commuter-oriented systems, the hardest-hit by the pandemic, be able to
adjust to a future where fewer people work in ofﬁces (but perhaps more live) in
downtowns and other major city centers? Will transit riders remain predominantly
disadvantaged travelers? Is the era where farebox revenues constitute a substantial
share of operating revenues drawing to a close? Will workers continue to leave or shy
away from front-line transit jobs? The answers to these questions will collectively
determine the ﬁnancial future of public transit in the U.S. Unfortunately high levels of
uncertainty as we write mean that these answers are likely to remain elusive for some
time to come.
Siddiq et al. 19

Acknowledgments
This research was made possible through funding received by the University of California
Institute of Transportation Studies from the State of California through the Public Transportation
Account and the Road Repair and Accountability Act of 2017 (Senate Bill 1) and by the Resilient
and Innovative Mobility Initiative from the State of California through a one-time General Fund
allocation included in the 2021 State Budget Act. The authors are grateful for this support and are
responsible for any errors or omissions. The authors would also like to thank all of the transit
operator staff who took the time to answer our survey questions.

Declaration of Conﬂicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conﬂicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following ﬁnancial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: We would like to acknowledge the University of California
Institute of Transportation Studies (UC-ITS-2022-15 and UC-ITS-RIMI-4B) for supporting this
research.

ORCID iDs
Fariba Siddiq  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0361-6594
Jacob L. Wasserman  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2212-5798
Brian D. Taylor  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1037-2751
Samuel Speroni  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4364-6162

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Author Biographies
Fariba Siddiq is a doctoral student in urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of
Public Affairs and a researcher at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. Her
Siddiq et al. 23

research interests lie in transportation equity, travel behavior, transportation ﬁnance,
land use transportation interaction, and innovative mobility.
Jacob L. Wasserman is a Research Project Manager at the UCLA Institute of
Transportation Studies. With a background in transportation equity, ﬁnance, and de-
mand management, Wasserman coordinates research into public transit and other
mobility issues. Prior, he worked for the Cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New
Haven.
Brian D. Taylor is Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy in the UCLA Luskin
School of Public Affairs and Director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies.
He studies travel behavior, transportation equity, ﬁnance, history, and politics, and most
recently, public transit use and ﬁnance during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Samuel Speroni is a doctoral student in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning and
researcher at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. He studies travel behavior,
transportation ﬁnance, and school transportation, especially the equity implications
within each of those areas. Recently, he has researched the effects of COVID-19 on
travel.

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