How transit could make the pandemic’s next phase controllable and livable

A lightly used MARC train during the COVID-19 pandemic. Large transit vehicles give riders space to physically distance that car-based transportation does not. (Photo by me)

The coronavirus pandemic has forced us all to discover meaning in the basics of our existence. Public transit agencies have done that in an exemplary manner, doubling down on the purest aspect of their mission: providing and protecting essential mobility.

Now, we face a greater shared challenge. COVID-19 still threatens our health and our lives, but we must find a way to get our economy and society back on their feet while keeping the coronavirus at bay.

If we open irresponsibly, the virus will resurge and devastate. But locking down indefinitely would be equally irresponsible; we’d face hunger, bankruptcy, and insanity, letting chains supplant creativity while the marginalized tasked with sustaining the separation make a potentially deadly sacrifice.

We will have to fight for months, possibly years to thread the needle between these two traps. In order to win the fight, we need control – and confidence – over our motion and our lives.

Certain interests, however, are encouraging civilization to surrender to auto dependency, even as the coronavirus contagion ruthlessly tears through their own Motor City. Such a surrender would strip society of its strength and substance.

Here’s how transit, through geometry, bioenvironment, safety, and unity, can keep control in the hands of the people.

Transit’s geometry lets us control our physical distance

Opening Washington, DC's Cleveland Park service lane to pedestrians gives customers of the neighborhood's grocery stores and take-out eateries space to physically distance. If too many people drive to and park at these establishments, it won't be possible to provide this essential space. (Photo by me)  

Mobility has always been a geometry challenge: lots of people must move, but there’s limited space available for the transportation systems that move them. If we get in each other’s way, no one can get where they’re trying to go; if we expand transportation space without rethinking it, however, we create more obstacles by inducing demand for trips. In either case, a community can’t function.

COVID-19 complicates this already-precarious equation: if people come within six feet of each other the virus will have more opportunities to spread, leading to an exponential spike in cases that kills people, overwhelms the healthcare system, and shuts down society.

So how can we provide sufficient mobility to power the responsible reopening we need and yearn for?

People might try to travel in a seemingly sealed-off car. But anyone who’s sat in a traffic jam knows that there isn’t space for mass solo driving, from dense cities to sprawling suburbs.

  

Furthermore, all people – including drivers – are pedestrians for part of every trip. But if we devote too much space to moving and storing solo cars, people will be hemmed onto dangerously narrow walkways and likely forced to congregate within six feet of each other.

In the past, people have tried to solve this problem by traveling in the same car, popularizing options like shared ride-hailing, casual carpooling or “slugging,” and simply giving friends or relatives rides.

But none of that is possible now, because people riding in the same automobile inevitably sit within six feet of each other.  A person could hire their own driver, but this option might be the worst of both worlds: they’ll still be in close proximity to the driver while, thanks to the extra miles of travel necessary to pick them up, road congestion increases.

Thus, large vehicles like buses and trains – which provide people space to spread out and can physically separate vehicle operators from passengers – are an ideal motorized solution. In order to keep the public safe and connected, these transit options must:

• Operate frequently and reliably, allowing for onboard physical distancing while ensuring crowds don’t build at stops and stations. Some places, like Houston, boosted transit service during the pandemic’s early days; now, frequent all-day service will be a must for bus, urban subway, and suburban rail lines around the world. Boston's MBTA, for example, is planning a return to full service in the coming weeks to ensure riders have sufficient space to physically distance.  
• Be supported by broader strategies to manage demand, including employer-facilitated staggered shift times and telework options for those who are willing and able to log in from home, continued government-managed restrictions on mass gatherings that catalyze sudden localized ridership spikes and overcrowd confined spaces, and sufficient availability of masks, testing, and contact tracing that help prevent the coronavirus from spreading.
• Serve corridors featuring wide sidewalks and complete streets, ensuring everyone has space to conduct physically-distanced business and activities.  Such space can allow people to access businesses, as DC is doing by giving people room to spread out in front of grocery stores, and also help reopened establishments operate more safely, as Tampa, FL is doing for its restaurants.

Providing this quality of service won’t be free of charge – in fact, it will require rethought transportation funding, of which the $25 billion CARES Act transit stimulus is a start. But the resulting space to move will give people the freedom and protection they need right now. 

Transit’s scale permits bioenvironmental control, providing people-friendly, virus-hostile places

A worker disinfects a New York subway train. For the first time in its history, New York MTA has suspended overnight train service to allow for additional cleaning. (Photo courtesy of New York Daily News)

As part of their COVID-19 management strategies, states and localities could mandate that car owners spend hours disinfecting their vehicles at the end of every day they drive them.

This would be a herculean effort to require of an individual. Accordingly, ride-hailing companies don’t require their drivers to take such action, though they’ve distributed sanitizing lotion and wipes to some of them.

Transit agencies, however, have made their fleetwide cleaning programs more stringent to help combat the pandemic. Simple economies of scale make this possible, giving the public more control over the sanitation of their mobility environment.

Because they operate many vehicles, transit providers can purchase powerful disinfectant and other cleaning supplies in bulk. They also can train and equip professionals to conduct the cleaning safely and properly. Even transportation network companies conduct such intensive cleaning – of the bike- and scooter-share fleets that, in contrast to their car services, they manage and operate centrally.  

In some cases, transit providers have had to reduce service in order to make the necessary adjustments to their cleaning protocol. For example, the DC area's WMATA closed more than a fifth of its Metrorail stations in late March in order to ensure it had the resources to sanitize more highly trafficked parts of its system. Also, this week New York City Transit began shutting down its subway late at night – for the first time in its history – to test and execute new disinfecting methods.

    

Evidence from responses to prior disease outbreaks, however, indicates that over time agencies can integrate enhanced cleaning into their general operations and remain ready to handle future epidemics.

For example, San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit System, which bolstered its cleaning program as part of its 2017 response to a Hepatitis A outbreak, has sustained more service for essential workers during COVID-19 than many of its U.S. peers have. And overseas, a 2015 outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome gave transit providers in Seoul – a place that’s sustained relative normalcy during the coronavirus crisis – experience with enhanced sanitation measures.

Furthermore, the control public transportation gives us over our bioenvironment extends beyond just transit vehicles and to all of the outdoors. By reducing air pollution, transit protects our lungs and hearts, making it easier for our bodies to function and reducing the chances people will experience lethal complications of respiratory diseases like COVID-19.

A UCLA study, for example, found that people infected with COVID-19’s Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome predecessor were more than twice as likely to die if they lived in a highly polluted place. Preliminary findings of a Harvard study awaiting peer review similarly suggest that for every sustained one-microgram-per-cubic-meter (µg/m³) increase in the concentration of Particulate Matter 2.5 a person is exposed to, the chances the person will die should COVID-19 infect them increase by 8 percent.

Researchers based in Wuhan, meanwhile, found in 2018 that subway expansions in China reduce PM2.5 concentrations by an average of eighteen µg/m³. Additionally, preliminary observations suggest that the 25 percent decline in PM2.5 concentrations during China’s coronavirus lockdowns saved up to 36,000 lives for each month they lasted.

While lockdowns aren’t sustainable environmental policy, transit improvements are. Thus, Wuhan authorities may want to listen to science and count the urns that stacked up outside funeral homes during the city’s coronavirus outbreak – and calculate how many lives cleaner air now might save from forthcoming diseases – before celebrating renewed traffic congestion and smog.

    

Transit gets us where we need to go, safely and together

A rider boards a Montreal bus through the rear door during the COVID-19 pandemic. Transit keeps society moving, in the face of humanity's many challenges. (Photo courtesy of CP24)

Fatally flawed working papers notwithstanding, there’s no evidence that transit use makes a person more likely to catch a respiratory infection. A London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine survey of 6,000 people in Britain, for example, found that those who don’t use buses or trains are somewhat more likely to come down with flu than transit riders are.

Data shows quite clearly, however, that for each mile traveled people on transit are ten times less likely to die in a crash than people in cars. Transit lines and hubs also boost activity density in the neighborhoods they serve, reducing miles driven and bolstering these safety benefits. Conversely, some of the same factors that make COVID-19 particularly threatening to the low-density areas it’s now spreading to – like limited health care resources – also render car-based mobility more lethal in those places; crash fatality rates are about two times higher in the U.S. countryside than in more urbanized locales.

Yet superior physical safety is just one component of transit’s greater unifying stability. And right now, we must come together and figure out how to make our shared spaces – and our society – work for everyone.

While auto dependence separates people, reinforcing conflict, social strata, and economic inequality, large-scale transit use fosters a culture that everyone – regardless of race, income, or creed – engages in together. For the system to work all riders must cooperate, respect each other, and navigate shared challenges, resulting in a network of connectivity that’s simply there for us, no questions asked.

By sustaining and protecting transit, we’ll be able to stay connected while controlling this virus, helping build the unity we need to address the problem.