On the London Underground, Piccadilly Circus station is nearly
vacant on a weekday morning, while the Delhi Metro is ferrying fewer than half
of the riders it used to. In Rio de Janeiro, unpaid bus drivers have gone on
strike. New York City subway traffic is just a third of what it was before the
pandemic.
اضافة اعلان
A year into the coronavirus pandemic, public transit is hanging
by a thread in many cities around the world. Riders remain at home or they
remain fearful of boarding buses and trains. And without their fares, public
transit revenues have fallen off a cliff. In some places service has been cut,
fares have gone up and transit workers are facing the prospect of layoffs.
That’s a disaster for the world’s ability to address that other
global crisis: climate change. Public transit offers a relatively simple way
for cities to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention a way to
improve air quality, noise and congestion in the world’s busiest cities.
“We are facing maybe the most important crisis in the public
transit sector in different parts of the world,” said Sérgio Avelleda, the
director of urban mobility for the World Resources Institute and a former
transport secretary for São Paulo, Brazil. “It’s urgent to act.”
But act how? Transit agencies that have been bailed out by the
government are wondering how long the generosity will last, and almost
everywhere, transportation experts are scrambling to figure out how to better
adapt public transit to the needs of riders as cities begin to emerge from the
pandemic.
There are a few outliers. In Shanghai, for example, public
transit numbers took a nosedive in February 2020, but riders have returned as
new coronavirus infections remain low and the economy rebounds.
But the picture is grim in many more cities.
One of the busiest metro systems in the world, the London
Underground, which normally clocks around 4 million journeys every weekday, is
currently operating at around 20 percent of its normal capacity. Buses are a
bit more populated, running around 40 percent of normal. The city transit
agency, which had once projected a budget surplus for 2020, has instead been
relying on government bailouts since the pandemic hit. It expects it will take
at least two years to see public transit usage return to pre-pandemic levels.
“It’s been pretty devastating, to be perfectly honest,” said
Alex Williams, director of city planning for Transport for London. “One of our
concerns are substantial declines in public transport and higher levels of car
use.”
London is one of a handful of cities around the world with a
congestion tax designed to reduce car traffic in the city center. Both London
and Paris sought to use lockdowns to expand bike lanes.
In the Indian capital, New Delhi, the subway reopened in
September after a suspension of many months. Ridership in February hovered
under 2.6 million, compared with more than 5.7 million for the same month the
year before, and bus traffic stood at just over half of pre-pandemic levels.
Lucky are those agencies, as in India and across Europe, that
are subsidized by their governments. There is even more distress in cities
where people rely in large part on private bus companies.
In Lagos, Nigeria, fares have doubled on private bus lines for
rides longer than a kilometer.
In Rio de Janeiro, a once-celebrated bus network is in a
shambles. The private company that runs the system has cut over a third of its
fleet and laid off 800 employees as the number of passengers has shrunk by half
since last March, according to the city transportation department. Strikes by
bus drivers have made bus travel even slower and more chaotic.
“I have never seen anything like it,” said José Carlos
Sacramento, 68, a leader of a bus workers union in Rio, who has been working in
public transportation for five decades. “I think it might never go back to
normal.”
City officials said they hope to use the crisis as an
opportunity to revamp the system, including by persuading the private bus
companies to be more transparent about their operations in exchange for
possible financial help from the government.
After all, said Maína Celidonio, the head of the city
transportation department, a clean, efficient bus system is critical for Rio to
not only reduce its carbon emissions but also to clean its air.
“It’s not just an environmental issue, but a public health
issue,” Celidonio said.
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