While clean air and traffic-free roads have been one of the few silver linings amid the coronavirus pandemic, there are worrying signs that the Bay Area’s fearsome congestion could come roaring back once public life resumes — and perhaps be worse than ever.

That’s because many of those who once packed into crowded buses and BART trains could opt to drive whenever people begin physically returning to work in large numbers.

It’s an understandable shift for virus-scarred commuters seeking the physical distance of a private car. But it presents a host of troubling consequences for a region where officials have long tried to lure people out of their automobiles: Gridlocked freeways and traffic misery, increased tailpipe emissions and deteriorating air quality, financial hardship for public transportation agencies.

“We are going to have lesser ridership on transit for the near future,” said Professor Frances Edwards of San Jose State’s Mineta Transportation Institute. And as a result, Edwards said, “We are going to have bad traffic.”

File photo of traffic moving bumper-to-bumper during the afternoon commute on I-80 in Berkeley, Calif. a year ago in March. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group) 

It’s impossible at this point to predict how many riders might make the switch to driving — and for how long.

For one, nobody knows when or if people will start traveling to jobs and schools in large numbers again. It’s also not clear whether a substantial share of businesses will keep letting — or encourage — employees to work from home post-pandemic, which some Santa Clara County officials are pushing as one solution to area traffic woes.

More broadly, traffic is typically a side-effect of a strong economy: the more people are working, the more people on the roads. Nobody knows what kind of shape the Bay Area’s once-booming economy will be in after the pandemic subsides.

“This is all new — there has never been a cratering of travel demand like this ever, at least in this country,” said John Goodwin, a spokesman for the region’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

Still, there are signs a shift could be underway.

Driving recovers, transit does not

After plummeting by more than half when shelter in place orders went into effect mid March, the number of cars crossing Bay Area bridges has been creeping back up recently. Through the first three days of this week, when revised shelter orders allowed some businesses to reopen, daily crossings of the region’s state-owned bridges reached their highest levels since the lockdown began, about 40 percent below normal.

There has been no bump in the number of passengers riding BART, which plateaued weeks ago at below 10 percent of pre-coronavirus levels and shows no sign of rising.

Mobility data from Apple shows searches for driving directions in the Bay Area have begun rebounding in recent weeks, while those for transit trips have remained far below normal.

Public transportation agencies expect it will be a very long time before their systems see the number of passengers they carried just a few months ago, and are bracing for deep budget cuts as the pandemic threatens them on two fronts: ticket revenue and funding from sales taxes.

BART’s most optimistic budget projections for the next fiscal year, from this July through June 2021, show ridership averaging half of what it was before the coronavirus outbreak sent the economy into a tailspin, spokeswoman Alicia Trost said. Worst-case scenarios show ridership down 85 percent over the year.

Even when those projections extend through the summer of 2022, Trost said, “None of them return back to normal levels.”

A few passengers make their way around the 12th Street BART Station during the late morning commute on the first day of shelter-in-place restrictions put into place in seven Bay Area counties, in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, March 17, 2020. (Anda Chu/Bay Area News Group) 

Similarly, VTA is projecting ticket revenues will remain less than half of pre-pandemic levels a year from now. And Caltrain officials forecast coronavirus could significantly affect their ridership well into next year, with staff warning in a recent presentation that the virus “presents a severe, prolonged crisis” for the railroad, which relies on fares for 70 percent of its operating budget.

Susan Shaheen, a civil and environmental engineering professor at UC Berkeley, warned that if coronavirus lingers — returning in waves of new infections, as some epidemiologists warn and BART’s models anticipate — riders may not feel safe on transit far into the future.

“The longer and more severe the impacts of COVID-19, the longer it will most likely take to get riders to return,” Shaheen said.

And it wouldn’t take much of a shift to worsen traffic in the Bay Area, where just over 20 percent of people either took public transportation or carpooled to get to work before the virus struck.

Modeling from Vanderbilt University researchers predicts that average commute times in San Francisco and the East Bay would rise by 10 minutes in each direction if regular pre-pandemic car commuters were joined behind the wheel by just one of every four transit riders or carpoolers. That translates to hundreds of thousands of cumulative hours residents would lose sitting in traffic.

Who will get back on the train?

It’s not like everyone who once took public transit or carpooled will drive when the pandemic subsides, experts say.

People who aren’t able to drive or can’t afford a car will keep riding public transportation because they don’t have another choice. Same for those who live or work in dense areas where owning a car just isn’t practical.

The question could come down to how many of the people transit officials call “choice” riders — those who could drive but opt for public transportation — will instead hop in their cars. Three-quarters of passengers on Caltrain, for instance, are considered “choice” commuters.

“Everybody’s travel choices are a complicated calculation of cost and convenience and time,” said Goodwin, the MTC spokesman. How expensive are parking, gas and tolls, and how much does a train ticket cost? How long will the trip take by bus compared to driving? How frustrating is the traffic?

The coronavirus has added another factor to that mix: Going forward, Goodwin said he expects people’s perceptions of the risk of getting sick from strangers on public transportation “will play a bigger role in each individual’s personal calculation, for those who have a choice.”

Even if many don’t come back, lingering danger of coronavirus transmissions could force transit systems to run more trains and buses in the near future to give riders space to socially distance — adding to the strain on their bottom lines.

Edwards, the San Jose State professor, researched what happened in the aftermath of violent attacks on public transportation, such as a mass shooting on a New York commuter train in the 1990s or the bombings of trains in Madrid and London in the 2000s.

In those areas, she said, many shaken “choice” commuters wound up avoiding transit and driving for a while. But that wasn’t the end of the story. As time went on, traffic got worse and those riders’ calculations shifted again — they went back to public transportation.

“They’re not going to go back right away, but they’ll go back sooner than later,” Edwards said.

“The traffic is going to become as bad as it ever was,” she said, before it all but forces people “to get back on the train.”