Vancouver vs. San Francisco: A Tale of Two Transit Recoveries

We’ve all kind of blocked it out of our minds but the COVID pandemic was absolutely devastating for transit ridership and even now, four years since 2020, we haven’t fully recovered. But some cities and systems actually fared much worse, while others have rebounded almost to their pre-pandemic numbers. In this video we’re going to take a look at the fall and recovery of rapid transit systems in the US and Canada to see who made it through the best and the worst.

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References:

Ridership data from APTA: https://www.apta.com/wp-content/uploa...
BC had laxer COVID rules than the rest of Canada in the summer of 2020: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2021/02/s...
Vancouver cut transit service less than most of North America: https://findingspress.org/article/133...
California stricter COVID measures: https://exploratory.io/viz/kanaugust/...
LA transit commuters tend to be lower income: https://www.governing.com/archive/gov...
Vancouver's strong downtown recovery: https://downtownrecovery.com/charts/r...
Population growth contributing to Vancouver's transit recovery: https://www.translink.ca/news/2024/ap...
Boston slow zones: https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-...
Boston maintenance problems: https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2023-...

Creative commons images of transit vehicles in different cities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBTA_su...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_L...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_(r...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARTA_r...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_S...