I knew it was going to be a big purchase, but it made a lot of sense at the time.” “I found this really cute Honda HRV, a used one in Berkeley, and I ended up getting a lot of my savings together that I had been saving up for a car. “A car is kind of the safest place where you’re isolated and can actually have your own mask off,” Bettendorf says. But then the pandemic hit, and Bettendorf wanted to take steps to keep her and her family safe. She’s a college student who grew up taking public transit in the Bay Area, and never saw herself buying a car until much later in her life, even after she moved to LA to attend USC. Natalie Bettendorf bought a car over the past year. “If people buy cars, they ride transit less, there’s less farebox revenue to support this service,” says Marlon Boarnet, a professor of urban planning at USC. Transit workers and researchers are worried too, with many saying that Metro ridership has fallen for the past decade because people who were transit-dependent found the money to buy cars.īut now, pandemic-induced concerns about hygiene and safety mean that even more Angelenos might have turned to car ownership. Whereas previously, I was taking it everyday to get to work,” they said of their ridership patterns during the pandemic. “I was taking it for errands here and there less consistently. Photo by Nisha Venkat.īut now, Kaiser worries that the once-thriving transit system might never return to what it was. Kaiser wears one of their Metro-themed pieces of clothing. The group’s goal: Create a space where people can together imagine a Los Angeles that runs on public transit. When the pandemic first hit, habits changed for Katrina Kaiser, a moderator of Angelic Thoughts for SoCal TOTs, a nearly 2000-person Facebook group for transit superfans in the Greater LA area. For the most part, Metro’s network of 92 rail stations and more than 2500 buses has been slow to fill back up, even as people venture out again. In 2020, Southern Californians took 213 million rides on Metro rail or bus, as opposed to 370 million the year before, according to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.Īnd this year, transit ridership numbers are only slightly increasing. COVID-19 has sent LA public transit numbers plummeting.
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