National and local transit ridership down significantly feds report
Is expensive high capacity transit needed for the Interstate Bridge project?
John Ley
for Clark County Today
The US Census Bureau reports that people using mass transit to commute to work remains 38 percent below pre pandemic levels. Put another way, 97 of 100 Americans do not use mass transit for daily trips. “About 70 percent of metro-based transit commuters (public transportation
commuters living in U.S. metro areas) lived in one of the seven transit-heavy metro areas: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.,” they report.
Nationally, more workers drove alone to work in 2022 than in 2019, and the number traveling by public transportation did not increase between 2021 and 2022. People biking is just 2.9 percent, carpooling is 8.6 percent. Both remain below 2019 levels. Locally, a 2022 OHSU employee survey found 9 in 10 respondents use telework to some degree, and 8 in 10 drive alone.
Washington state was one of two states where over 20 percent of workers were home-based. Oregon is one of 15 states where 16 percent to 19.9 percent worked from home. “The share of people working from home roughly tripled during the pandemic’s initial phase,” they report. It increased from 5.7 percent of workers in 2019 to 17.9 percent in 2021, but then declined to 15.2 percent of workers in 2022 as pandemic restrictions came to an end.
Here in the Portland metro area, TriMet data mirrors the national trend of reduced transit ridership. In March 2024, ridership remained 34 percent below pre pandemic levels and about half its 2012 peak. At C-TRAN, ridership was down nearly 37 percent at the end of 2022 compared to pre pandemic ridership. Furthermore, C-TRAN ridership peaked in 1999 at 7.75 million boardings. They had just 3.97 million boardings on their fixed route system in 2022; 49 percent below the peak almost a quarter century ago.
This issue is vitally important to Clark County and Portland metro citizens because the Interstate Bridge Replacement Program (IBR) team members are telling the community that there will be between 26,000 and 33,000 daily transit boardings on the I-5 corridor in 2045. This is likely designed to justify their proposal that $2 billion be spent on a 3-mile MAX light rail extension into Vancouver as part of their $7.5 billion proposal.
C-TRAN offers the only transit service over the Columbia River. The agency experienced a 61 percent drop in passenger boardings on its express bus system over the two years of pandemic lockdowns. The agency shared numbers for nine separate routes traveling over the river for the 2019 to 2021 years. In 2019, it had 1.4 million boardings which then declined to 555,000 in 2021..
Express Routes crossing the I-5 Bridge saw an average of just 523 daily boardings in 2022, C-TRAN shared with Clark County Today. Express Routes crossing the I-205 bridge saw an average of 273 daily boardings. Overall, C-TRAN carried 14.5 people per hour of service across their entire bus network in 2022, according to its annual report.
For the IBR transit projections to be accurate, daily ridership on the I-5 corridor would have to increase fifty-fold to reach their 26,000 number. It would have to increase 63 times to reach the 33,000 number. One state representative told IBR Administrator Greg Johnson, “I’m f***ed if I take those numbers to my constituents.”
The Oregon Transportation Commission conducted a survey in 2019. They reported people’s top priority (51 percent) for fixin
