Getting Around During a Pandemic: COVID-19 Changes Transportation in New York City
An excerpt from my Master’s thesis. Full version with interactive charts and maps here.
For millions of New Yorkers, the pandemic changed one of the most fundamental aspects of daily life: how they got around. Suddenly, they found themselves couped up in their homes, avoiding the public transit they once took for granted. Terrified of COVID-19, many abandoned the city’s subways and buses, instead opting to walk, ride bikes and take the driver’s seat to get where they needed to go.
Megan Cogguillo, 27, who bought a car last July while living in Brooklyn’s Windsor Terrace neighborhood, was one of them. She had spent four long months alone in her apartment, with no end in sight. She was terrified of taking the subway and being enclosed in a box with strangers who might have the virus.
“I felt so trapped in my apartment and my neighborhood,” said Cogguillo.
The combination of fear, loneliness and boredom prompted her to look for a car, something she never expected to do when she moved to Brooklyn five years ago, she said. For her, the ability to take the subway at any hour was one of the biggest draws of living in New York City.
“It seemed like such a hassle to park—to move your car constantly or pay a fortune for a garage,” said Cogguillo, who is 27 years old and works in operations at a financial services firm downtown. “Before the pandemic, it didn’t seem worth it at all.”
On the day she felt she’d had enough, Cogguillo started looking for her car—something used and compact. She found a 2017 Honda Fit with 30,000 miles on it for $14,000. Just a couple days later, she picked up her new ride.
Cogguillo was far the only one in her neighborhood of Park Slope or elsewhere in New York City to make that decision. In the ZIP code she was living in, there were just over a thousand more personal cars registered a year into the pandemic than when it began. That’s almost 10% more than before.
Unlike any event in recent history, COVID-19 forced New Yorkers to reconsider the convenient modes of public transportation they had taken for granted. Suddenly, the risk of infection played into the calculus of deciding how to get around. Suddenly, packing into a crowded rush hour train shifted from an inconvenience to a real source of anxiety.
New Yorkers adapted.
Before the pandemic, the subways and buses were a bustling part of the fabric of New York City life. On an average weekday in 2019, over 5 million people would swipe into the subway and another 2 million would ride a bus. But in 2020, those figures fell by half, according to MTA ridership data.
By the end of the year, fewer people had ridden the subway in 2020 than in any year since at least 1910. In 2020, passengers took 639.5 million subway rides, according to the MTA. That’s compared to 725 million in 1910.
A detailed analysis of multiple data sources covering how New Yorkers get around found that many New Yorkers abandoned shared modes of transit during the height of the pandemic, instead choosing private ways of getting around like driving cars, riding bikes, and walking to travel without worrying about the virus.
Here are some key details about transportation has played out during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic:
Public transit floundered as many adopted private forms of transportation like driving cars and riding bikes.
A standstill: In the earliest days of the pandemic, subway ridership fell by over 90 percent, according to MTA ridership data. That’s around 4 million fewer rides per day. Bus ridership fell by over 75 percent.
Transit recovery remains elusive: As of early August, there were less than half of the riders on a typical day on a similar day pre-pandemic. While recovery varied by station, all but two stops had less than 60 percent of their previous ridership by May.
New York as a car city: There were more personal cars registered across the five boroughs a year into COVID-19 than before. This was despite the city losing a net 89,000 residents over the course of the year, according to the Brookings Institution. Car registrations were especially concentrated in the wealthier Brooklyn neighborhoods near the Hudson River and Prospect Park. Prospect Heights had the most dramatic influx: 15 percent more on the road than before the pandemic.
More biking than ever: More New Yorkers chose bikes than ever, for leisure and to get where they needed to go. Rides on the Queensboro Bridge went up by over 36% in the year following the pandemic, from 1.24 million to 1.69 million, according to the NYC DOT’s bike counter data. Around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, there were at least 24 percent more bikers.
Catastrophe for cabs: At their worst, yellow cab rides were down 95 percent compared to the previous month. Ride share services were down around 80 percent at the same time.