Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.

I'm Manuela Saragossa.

Coming up, the transport bosses wondering if commuters will ever come back.

Since March, it's been pretty scary, just not wanting to touch anything.

Some passengers are still afraid of being contaminated. So can mass transport in cities

survive the COVID pandemic? We are going to need a federal financial rescue for the transit system.

If you do not have millions of people every day flowing freely through the transit system, the city really doesn't work.

That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC.

I commute every day. I took the 645 from Long Island Railroad train this morning and got on the

two and then the one to come down in the

office at 2 Broadway, which is where the MTA's headquarters. And I've been doing that, you know,

throughout the, throughout the pandemic. Pat Foy is a lifelong New Yorker. He's also chairman of New York's

public transport system, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority,

or MTA. And even the pandemic hasn't stopped his daily commute to work in Manhattan.

Mr. Foy's problem is that other commuters in New York haven't been as keen to follow his example,

even though he and his team have taken lots of steps to ensure all transport is as safe as it can be.

I and my colleagues throughout the entire organization are part of a mask force and we go out and hand out mask.

When we encounter someone which is rare that doesn't have a mask on, we've got a mask to hand out the police play the same role. We're disinfecting every

subway car and subway station multiple times a day. Same thing with respect to buses, paratransit

and commuter rails. Despite all those precautions, New York's millions of pre-COVID commuters

are staying away. Passenger numbers there on

subways and railways are down to just a third of what they used to be. It's so bad that

...