Solving Traffic Congestion and Transit Ridership in Post-Pandemic Times

KQED's Forum

KQED

News Commentary, News, Politics

4.2 • 727 Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The stay at home orders of 2020 and the shift to remote work drastically changed how people commute. Now, more than three years after the onset of the pandemic, ridership on most public transit still hasn’t recovered, and in some cases is consistently hovering below half of pre-pandemic levels. But car traffic has rebounded, and then some. Bay Bridge data shows that some mornings, congestion heading into San Francisco is even worse than in 2019. This comes at a time when experts agree we should be transitioning away from solo car trips. We’ll discuss how local transit agencies are adapting to these new transportation trends, and hear about efforts to get more people out of their cars and onto buses and trains. Guests: Dan Brekke, editor and reporter, KQED News Joe McConnell, former traffic reporter, KQED - Joe recently retired after more than 36 years with the station Rebecca Long, director of fegislation and public affairs, Metropolitan Transportation Commission Daniel Rodriguez, director, Institute of Transportation Studies UC Berkeley Janice Li, president, BART's Board of Directors Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for Forum comes from Rancho La Puerta, a wellness resort on 4,000 acres in the mountains of Baja, California, just 45 minutes from San Diego.
0:09.4	Family owned and operated since 1940, Rancho La Pueerta offers adult summer camp-like vacations for anyone who enjoys hiking, mindfulness, and fitness classes.
0:19.8	Special rates and offers are available for summer stays and first-time guests.
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0:27.6	Greetings, boomtown.
0:29.0	The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming!
0:31.3	Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile.
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0:38.7	Learn more at Xfinity.com. Restrictions apply. Xfinity internet required. Actual speeds vary. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:00.9	Well, transportation in the Bay Area is a mess.
1:03.8	The traffic is bad.
1:04.9	Transit agencies are in tough streets as ridership has fallen off.
1:08.6	We don't really know if in the long term the classic
1:11.7	commute to downtown model will survive. And if it doesn't, what then? The pandemic cracked open
1:17.8	our local ways of circulating here in the Bay Area and we have just never gone back to quote
1:22.2	unquote normal. Worse, we know that in the long term, we need more collective solutions to
1:27.1	transportation than each of us getting in a huge machine and driving by ourselves.
1:32.3	So today, we talk about the conundrum we find ourselves in now and how we might get out.
1:37.2	That's coming up next after this news.
2:01.6	Welcome to F. I'm Alexis Madrigal. I am absolutely and entirely allergic to driving to work here at the station. In fact, I have never done it. My standard commute is that I bike to BART and then cross under the bay in those amazing tunnels and get off at 16th Street before walking across the mission. So I've had an up-close
2:08.4	view of the struggles our transit systems going through until just the last few weeks. I'd
2:14.4	hardly ever seen a full Bart train in the last two years of commuting.
	...

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