Expert: Local tech layoffs threaten BART’s ridership

Wolf Street’s Wolf Richter analyzes Bay Area Rapid Transit’s (BART) recent reversion in rider numbers—post-Covid progress eroding slowly but surely—which Richter attributes to prolific tech industry layoffs. BART’s expenses being mostly fixed, it’s unclear how the continually-expanded system can support itself moving forward.

In December 2022, the 3.34 million rides were down by 61.8% from December 2019, and there has been zero progress in ridership since June 2022, when ridership was down 61.9% from June 2019. The June drop was still a huge decline, still a collapse in ridership, but it was the smallest collapse, if you will, since the lockdowns, amid hopes of further frustratingly slow recovery.

But then the layoff announcements at tech and social media companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley started to ricochet around, and progress halted entirely.

This chart shows the change in ridership each month in 2020 through 2022 compared to the same month in 2019, thereby eliminating the issues of the seasonal drops over the holidays in November and December.

This drop in ridership comes as the brand-spanking new trains that had been ordered years ago, have entered service, and they’re nice, but they weren’t free (and the epic “BART screech” in curves persists somehow).

This article originally appeared in Wolf Street. Read the whole thing here.

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