Save themselves a TON money, eh?
Flex hours….
No transporation costs….
Which means less mass transit ridership….
No Food costs…
No baby sitters……
Why go BACK to a office if ya don’t need to?…….
People aren’t going back to the office. That’s a compounding problem for transit agencies across the country that are grappling with the new normal, Danielle Muoio Dunn and Ry Rivard report.
Transportation officials are finding that in the era of remote work, successful service means getting people all over the city at all hours. It’s no longer just about schlepping to work five days a week, especially in places seeing few commuters on weekdays.
The problem is they don’t have the money to innovate. The largest systems are still seeing less than 70 percent of their pre-pandemic traffic and are turning to city and state governments for new funding streams and taxes.
Agencies face little choice but to sacrifice something if they want to woo new kinds of riders, which risks leaving those who still must commute literally stranded.
“It would be nice to continue to support the regeneration of nightlife and theater and everything with even more frequent service,” said Janno Lieber, the head of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “But in fairness…it’s really not time to focus excessively on it until you’re confident that we’re filling the bucket.”…..