Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Thursday, June 10th. I'm Naila Boudou. Here's

what we're watching today, an uptick in trans murders in the US, plus President Biden

reverses the ban on TikTok. But first, what's next for mass transit is today's one big thing.

During the pandemic, ridership of mass transit pretty much collapsed. Now, as the country

reopens, transportation experts are hoping that commuters will come back too. But what if

they don't? Joanne Muller's Axios' transportation correspondent and joins us now from Detroit.

Good morning, Joanne. Good morning, Naila. As I was just saying, mass transit took a huge

hit during the pandemic. First, our experts confident that riders will come back.

I think that this is still to be seen. These transit agencies really suffered a lot. I mean,

transportation was down like 90% at one point. So we've crawled back to 50% because there aren't a

lot of options. But people who can afford it have been buying their own cars and driving themselves

where they want to go. But there's also this great uncertainty about how the future of work is

going to shake out. And therefore, how commuting will shake out? What are different agencies

around the country doing to entice riders to come back? Well, one thing that we're seeing a big

movement on is the addition of sort of flexible on-demand rides on shuttles. A very common

company that does this is Via. They have partnered with a lot of transit agencies around the country

to sort of fill the gaps. Do that first mile, last mile, connection to the existing transit system.

But often, you know, there's just not enough demand to have a full 40-person bus running up and

down a certain street or to a certain neighborhood. So you could do this on-demand flexible

shuttle ride. And it suits people much better. And it gets the people where they need to go.

So we're seeing a lot of that. We're also seeing as traffic has increased,

agencies have figured out that they need to clear lanes for buses because they want people to ride

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