Four reasons the VTA strike is a non-event
Image by Wikimedia Commons
Union and politicians' predictions that the VTA transit worker walkout would have a notable impact on Valley commuting and business has turned out to be wildly exaggerated. A quick look at publicly available data explains why: VTA ridership is so low, only a miniscule percentage of local travelers notice that the buses and ghost rail aren't running.
Fun facts about VTA ridership:
1.) Public transit in Santa Clara County carries less than 1% of daily trips.
2.) Total ridership across all three of VTA’s modes (light rail, bus, paratransit) daily is 96,600, but 1,300 of those rides are paratransit and the operator of that service is not impacted by the strike. So, we're losing 95,300 daily rides because of the strike. If the average rider takes two trips on VTA each day, we're talking about less than 50,000 people being inconvenienced. That's 0.026—a quarter of a single percent—of the county population (1.93m).
3.) VTA’s dispersed route model means the impact of the shutdown is spread out, and less significant. Compare this to BART, in which most riders have (or at least had) one destination: downtown SF.
4.) Comparisons of this year's VTA strike with the last notable local transit strike (BART 2013) are misleading: in 2013, BART’s monthly rides were 11,062,296, while VTA’s monthly rides in January 2025 was 2,366,212, 75% less. So, BART ridership pre-strike was more than 4x greater than VTA's today.
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