This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 7th,

2003. I'm Caleb Brown. How are transit systems dealing with a large

transition of workers away from the office? In San Francisco it's been quite the opposite of what you might expect.

Transit authorities there are wanting massive new investments in transit.

Cato's Mark Joffi provide some details.

Among the many disruptions that the pandemic gave us,

transportation systems was a big one,

and cities, how did they respond with with transit and things like that?

Well they tried to maintain their their schedules but because of work from home a lot of people stopped using it.

The bottom came a couple of months into the pandemic and it's only gradually recovered since then, especially in cities that are very

tech heavy like San Francisco.

Okay, so what was San Francisco's response specifically?

Well, San Francisco, like the rest of California, had a pretty strong lockdown approach.

The local media showed a lot of concern about the spread of COVID and I think people took the advice to

mask heavily, socially distance, and generally avoid the workplace. So the idea of working from home became a bit more embedded in San Francisco than it did in comparable

cities like Austin or Miami.

All right, what, you know, here coming up on three years since the beginning of the pandemic,

what, what should transit systems be rethinking?

Well, it's gonna, it's gonna depend obviously. should transit systems be rethinking?

Well, it's going to depend obviously on their ridership.

So the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, which is the commuter system for San Francisco, has suffered a pretty steep drop and it's not really coming back.

I think it's around 40% of the pre-pandemic level.

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