[00:00:00] He is the president of Stedman Hill Consulting. And today he will be talking about the impact of covid-19 on public transportation in Vermont and elsewhere. And some of the key trends that may emerge if and when the pandemic declines. So with that, I'm going to hide myself and let Stephen present.

[00:00:26] Thanks a lot, Gaby. I'm a transportation consultant based in Montpelier, Vermont. I've been here for 15 years and I've worked for the state of Vermont for a long time, as well as Green Mountain Transit, Rural Community tansportation, other transit providers in Vermont and also the state of New Hampshire. And there have been many common themes in public transit work over the years. And one of the biggest themes is working to increase ridership on public transit. And just this past year, I did a study for the Vermont legislature looking at ways to increase public transit ridership all over Vermont, especially rural areas. But of course, six weeks ago, everything changed and increasing ridership is no longer the goal for everything. And so Sustainable transportation of Vermont asked me to talk about what's the future for public transportation, especially even after the current crisis is over. So we'll be talking about the future. But let's get going.

[00:01:27] Before we can really discuss the future, let's talk about the past. A little bit. So it's been a perennial theme of transit agencies for many years and the governmental partners to encourage people not to drive, to don't drive by yourself to carpool, use the bus, walk, ride your bike, anything but driving alone.

[00:01:50] And this has been true for at least 50 years, going back to the 1960s and 1970s when the Clean Air Act came in and when public subsidy of public transportation began really in the 1960s and 70s. Over the years and in different places, the reasons for the encouragement of public transit have changed. And the inducements are varied. So back in the 70s with the Clean Air Act amendments was to ride the bus so you can improve air quality.

[00:02:20] And that's been a theme since then when there's terrible traffic congestion in cities, its use transit to reduce traffic congestion. We find some of that in Chittenden county. People have been told to ride the bus to save money. It's cheaper than buying a car. Or in recent years it's really been helping to stop climate change to reduce the reliance on driving, to reduce the use of fossil fuels, to get into carpools, get into van pools, ride the bus, ride the train, anything to reduce driving and reduce the amount of energy.

[00:03:03] Now. Starting in mid-March, six weeks ago, this 15 years of consistent messaging about riding transit and ridesharing came to an abrupt halt.

[00:03:14] So instead of encouraging people to share rides, we had to be discouraged from being close to one another. And in addition to that, basically all nonessential travel has been strongly discouraged. So who is still riding the bus? Really, only people riding the bus are people who have to be on the bus. Those who have no other mobility options. They either cannot drive or cannot afford a car or don't have a car. And people who are not able to work from home. Their jobs require them to come to work. People who are essential employees, that includes medical workers, of course, but also employees in grocery stores and so forth. And people who need to travel for the basic necessities to shop themselves to get to their medical appointments. Anything else that they need to do to keep their lives going. And if they don't have a car, then they're still required to ride the bus in essence. So what's been the impact on public transit in the present period? Ridership is down significantly from where it was last year or even six weeks ago, so the figures in Vermont are generally about 70 percent loss of ridership among demand response public transit. That is, people driving volunteer driver cars or vans carrying people, disabilities or older adults. That's down about 72 percent compared to last year. And bus ridership overall is down 70 percent. Greenmount Transit weekday ridership is down 73 percent. But weekend ridership is only down about 55 percent. Still a steep drop and not quite as much. And we find that routes that serve shopping areas are down less than routes that serve commuters or workplaces. So shopping is down again, about 50 percent, 55 percent, but commuter oriented services are down more like 70 or 80 percent. In addition to the drop in ridership, service has been reduced as well. Many routes have been suspended or replaced with demand response service. That's happened in the Northeast Kingdom. It's happened all over the state, really, and currently about 50 percent of service hours have been reduced based on where we were six weeks ago. So it's a significant reduction in the amount of service. Of course, there's still very few people on the buses and vans that are still out there. One other change that's happened in Chittenden County is that GMT has decided to go fare free for the time being for the foreseeable future. This is both to recognize that the people on the bus are those were at the lower end of the income scale generally and also to reduce the interaction with drivers so that someone can get on or off the back door without ever passing by the fare box. So that's both a fair way to provide service and also the safest way to provide service. So now looking toward the future, which you'll see on the next few slides here are mainly a bunch of questions because that's what we have at this point, are questions. There are many unknowns such as, you know, having to do just with the pandemic and when will a vaccine, be ready. And many scientists are saying at least 18 months, then they don't know how effective the vaccine will be because we don't know how much of this virus mutates and whether it would be like the flu where you'd have partial immunity and then the virus mutates so that you'd have to have a different vaccine. We don't know if people have caught the virus already are immune or if the virus mutates so that they could catch it again. And also, will there be an effective treatment that could help reduce the mortality rate? All of these are unknowns.

[00:07:02] The scientific community is working very hard on this, but we don't know any of the answers in terms of the loosening of social distancing restrictions, which is very much in the news and may start in some places in the coming weeks. Will it lead to new waves of infections? Can it be done on a targeted basis? So that's a rural areas might be able to have the restrictions reduced, but urban areas would have them in place longer. And if can local economies resume, if we can restrict intra city and interstate and international travel.

[00:07:38] So if an area has a very low infection rate currently and the spread is stopped, can the local economy there resume as long as people are not coming to that area from other parts of the state, other parts of the country or other parts of the world? So none of these questions have been resolved, but they have big impact on how the economy is going to resume over the next weeks and months.

[00:08:04] So what's the impact on transit in the future? So let's talk about the near-term future and the longer term future separately.

[00:08:10] In the near term, transit can continue to do what it's doing now, which is to transport people who cannot otherwise drive to support their lifeline trips. And that's for shopping, medical and work trips for people who can't work at home. The existing precautions and protocols that are in place will continue to ensure the safety of drivers and passengers. And the traditional messaging that we talked about at the beginning about, you know, ride the bus to save the environment, all that sort of stuff that will have to continue to be suspended for the time being. We cannot be encouraging people to do ride sharing until the pandemic is really under much better control in the medium term. As soon as the pandemic ends, which maybe a year from now, maybe 18 months, maybe two years, we don't really know. The service levels, the amount of service operated will probably return to what it was before that depending on what the budget situation is. And that's, of course, a big question. In big cities, there's massive loss of fare revenue. it's a crisis situation in places like New York and Boston. And it's questionable whether service can be restored to that level in the near term or the medium term, depending on the level of government subsidy available mainly from the federal government. It's unlikely that all riders will return right away even after the pandemic, oil prices will continue to be very low for the foreseeable future. We don't really know that, but that's pretty likely. And people will understandably be reluctant to go getting close quarters with other people until some period of time is passed. When people are sure that the pandemic is really behind us and we don't know how long that's going to be, it might be a year, might be two years until people really feel comfortable in that we're truly past the pandemic.

[00:10:07] And at that point, we can begin transitional sort of reassuring messaging about the safety of riding and ride sharing. It's not going to be the full gangbusters. Let's get everyone on the bus again. But we have to just try to bring back the people who were there and to reassure them that it's safe to do that. So now what are the longer term impacts of Covid-19 on public transit? You know, one of the questions, again, many, many questions on this slide. How long will it take before life really returns to normal? You know, as I said before, maybe it's a year after the pandemic ends. Maybe it's two years. We don't really know. It's going to depend a lot on how the pandemic comes under control if there's further waves of infection. How effective the vaccine is and all those other questions that we didn't have answers to at the beginning. But once life returns to normal in general, how will the role of public transit have changed? Will, there have been a permanent shift in how people work?

[00:11:12] So most people who can work at home are now working at home. This was a trend already in place that there was a reduction in commuting, especially on commuter oriented routes, long distance bus routes, that people were starting already to work a day or two or week at home, whereas 10 years ago they might have been going five days a week into the office. Now, it's been even before this started, three or four. Of course currently, it's at zero for most of those people. And then once the pandemic ends will they say, well, I sort of like working at home or maybe I'll go into the office only once or twice a week, it's going to depend a lot on the person's job, on their personality, on their employer, how that happens.

[00:11:53] But it's pretty likely in my view, that the trend toward working at home will have been accelerated and made somewhat permanent by the current situation.

[00:12:05] If that's the case and many of the traditional commuters leave public transit, will transit be seen just as a social service?

[00:12:12] If there's a period where the only people on the bus are people who are completely dependent on public transportation, that they have no cars, that it's mostly lower income people, older people. Will that perception of transit really hold for a long time, that it's just a social service to some extent that exists today in some areas. But it may be become even stronger and harder to overcome that transit really has an important role for all of society and not just for people who can't drive.

[00:12:42] And then another longer term question is will there be effects on future land use and development? Because all of the future public transportation really depends on what happens with land use.

[00:12:54] So the pandemic has affected different parts of the country and different parts of the world in different ways. Urban areas have seen the highest infection rates, the greatest number of cases. For the simple reason that people are close together and it's hard to maintain social distancing when you're in a city of millions of people. It's somewhat easier. In a lot of Vermont, where we have smaller towns where you can go on the sidewalk and and it's pretty easy to stay six feet away from someone.

[00:13:22] But in Manhattan, that's very difficult to do. So now another question is, will this lead to some sort of de urbanization with people who are afraid of this kind of thing? Leaving cities and moving to other areas? Then the question becomes, what other areas do they move to? Do they go to traditional suburbs? Do they go to small towns like we have many here in Vermont, or did they go to remote areas and have a cabin in the woods where they feel more self-sufficient and more isolated? That's a big unknown. What what happens with that and then we'll have to see over the next 5, 10 years what the trends are. But if the trend is toward small towns, cities, small cities and small towns like we have many in Vermont, like Montpelier, where I live or many of the other towns in Vermont, then the future for transit can be bright because you have people living in a small town who can still walk for many of their basic trips and who also would have access to efficient public transit routes. So this last slide, I've called the permanent crisis because we are obviously in a crisis situation now. And COVID-19, has proved that behavior can change in the blink of an eye, in a crisis and in the transit bussiness, we talk many times about how difficult it is to convince people to stop driving, to change their behavior, to change where they live, to decide to use the bus or carpool and how what the challenges are and in overcoming those ingrained behaviors. Now, this crisis shows that it can all change immediately if necessary. But we have, of course, a long term crisis, climate change, which has been around for decades and will continue to be around. And even though most people don't see it as the same kind of crisis, we need a crisis reaction to be able to get the kind of behavioral changes necessary to avoid the greenhouse gas emissions that we've had until six weeks ago to really get the situation under control, where life as we know it can continue for the rest of the century and into the next century without catastrophes happening in coastal cities and everything else that's associated with global climate change. So the questions I have here are, you know, can people be convinced that climate change is as life threatening as a virus. True that in the immediate term, it's not. But in the longer term, it is potentially as life threatening, especially if you're in some of those coastal areas. We've had major reduction in transportation emissions over the last six weeks. So can that be sustained? The amount of driving has gone down drastically. Similar to the amount of public transit ridership. What can be done to sustain that reduction in driving and transportation imitations of greenhouse gas emissions? On the other hand, will things get worse because no one wants to be in close quarters with others? Will that residual effect of social distancing continue so that it will continue to be the fact then the only people on the bus are the people who have to be on the bus? Can we overcome that once the pandemic is gone? Once people have been reassured, that climate change is as important a crisis as COVID-19, was in saving the earth long term and that public transit in coordination with better land use and planning that can help reduce the amount of emissions from the transportation sector and help preserve the earth for future generations. So with that I will invite Gabby back on and we can start the discussion.

[00:17:36] All right. Awesome. So thank you so much for this talk so far. And now we'll be looking at the questions that are coming in. So any of the viewers, if you have any questions, please write them in the chat below. We do have a question already which says, do you know how much funding from the CARES Act has been allocated towards transit related assistance? And is there any indication of additional federal support in the near term?

[00:18:03] I believe in the CARES Act, they allocated $25 billion for transit assistance. I'm not aware of the details about how that's supposed to be distributed, whether that's operational assistance to help the transit agency survive this crisis. I know that that is inadequate. You read what the MTA in New York just needs five billion in the immidiate to survive. That's just one agency. Many agencies are having significant budget problems.

[00:18:32] And of course, in states which are major supporters of public transit and in many states, not all of them, but Vermont allocates some eight billion dollars of state funds to support public transit, will face significant budget pressures and less aid to states come at some future goal from Congress.

[00:18:52] Somebody else said can you talk about micro- transit at all?

[00:18:57] So micro- transit is a developing trend in public transportation, where for those of you who are not aware of what it is, it's a sort of Uber pool or on demand ridesharing, enabled by technology, and it's meant to complement or supplant a traditional bus routes in areas that don't have enough density of demand. Don't have enough people or enough density in one specific cooridor to support a bus route. So that if you're in a suburban area or a town where there's plenty of people, but not enough necessarily support a bus route, you can use an app to request a ride to a specific spot. And in real time, the company offering micro transit will find other people who want to go in that same area, create and manifest instructions for the driver to go pick up those people and take them where they want to go. So it's not a taxi because you don't get the right to yourself. It's not a regular carpool because it's just  created spontaneously, but it's potential for certain areas. And we're supposed to have a microtrasit in Montpelier starting this summer. That may be on hold, but we don't know as an alternative to traditional bus routes. Now, if that means fewer people in a car or in a vehicle, that may be more attractive to some people, of course, you're still in relatively close quarters with the other riders. So that doesn't necessarily overcome the whole social distancing issue. But it is a potential solution going forward if many of the bus routes that have been in operation are no longer viable.

[00:20:49] Jack said it seems that airlines are getting a much larger bailout than public transit. Is this true? And if so, do you care to speak about why you think that is?

[00:21:00] Well, airlines are private companies.

[00:21:04] Public transit obviously is not. The current administration is probably more favored toward that kind of industry. There's news articles about Boeing looking for billions of dollars in assistance. Of course, Boeing was in a lot of trouble before Covid-19 because of the 737 max incident. So they were already on the ropes.

[00:21:28] Obviously, any time money is handed out, politics gets involved. Public transit is not at the top of the list of the current administration. Certainly not at the top of Mitch McConnell's list.

[00:21:40] So I am sure that currently and thus far, the airlines have fared better. There is an effective advocacy organization for public transit. The American Public Transportation Association. Many states are advocating for it. It'll be a political battle over the coming months to make sure that transit agencies are made whole by this and don't have to shut down large sections of their system or close routes, because that even though they're far fewer riders, they are still an essential service to the people who are riding it.

[00:22:19] So, John, last we talked about telecommuting, suggesting that it can grow in Vermont from 7 percent now to over 25 percent.

[00:22:28] Is there any relationship between telecommuting and relationships to transit?

[00:22:35] Yeah, definitely. Yeah. As I mentioned earlier, even before this crisis started, I was doing a study in New Hampshire and I was talking to intercity bus operators there, many of which in southern New Hampshire operate essentially commuter service into the Boston area from Portsmouth, from Nashua, from places like that. And these are people commuting every day to go work in Boston somewhere. And they were saying over the past few years, they've been finding that their riders who used to go five days a week are now only going three or four days a week and that they're working from home one or two days. And that there's a direct correlation there, and especially for longer distance routes like that, those are more attractive for transit to capture, because certainly commuting into the Boston area from New Hampshire is difficult on a normal basis.

[00:23:25] All the traffic congestion and it's easier to  run a bus and they are successful. A lot of those bus routes, they operate with very little or no public subsidy. The ones in Portsmouth are private companies and they're profitable. It's unusual on a transit route to be profitable. But if you have a significant market advantage like you do there.

[00:23:47] You can run profitably. And they are definitely seeing a major hit from this. And  that may be permanent. You know, it's probably not going down to zero, but a significant hit from where they were and 25 percent, I could easily see that or more in terms of telecommuting. You know, you read news articles that some people love working at home and some people are going crazy working at home. And it's going to depend on your own situation and the kind of work you do.

[00:24:15] But there's definitely a possibility that that's a permanent hit on commuter oriented public transit.

[00:24:25] So another question says, during extended economic downturns, irrespective of global pandemics, could we actually see an increase in transit ridership?

[00:24:37] That is hard to imagine that you've seen increase because overall transit ridership is pretty closely coordinated with the economy and correlated with the economy, that when there are more people working and there's more travel, ridership goes up. It's not just that there's more demand, but there's more traffic congestion on roads. So there's more of an incentive to ride trains and buses to avoid that traffic congestion.

[00:25:02] Certainly this is hurting people's incomes and some people may not be able to afford a car after this. And so you may get some more riders on the margin like that.

[00:25:11] But the overall ridership would not be going up when there's a severe economic downturn.

[00:25:20] And if you were writing Vermont's Vtrans public transit plan today, what might you write differently? Or research further?

[00:25:30] That's a tough question. I mean, that plan is a 10 year plan. It's designed to set policies for the normal condition. That plan talked about climate change, some and all of the common themes that we talked about before about increasing ridership. It was done. I finished it in early March just before the crisis hit. I don't know whether Vtrans would have wanted to devote a lot of time in that particular plan to this crisis because we hope it's short term. We hope things get back to quote unquote, normal after this, because you know what's happened to transit is pretty bleak in terms of the future. And a lot of good things would have to happen for transit to get on a healthy footing in the medium term and to recover where it would go in the future.

[00:26:26] So it would be tough. Really just take account of that in the PTPP.

[00:26:35] OK. So I think that all the questions that we have. Thank you so much for joining us today Stephen we really appreciate it and it was very interesting. So I will be turning this off if there are no more questions. OK. Thank you very much. Thank you everybody.