The rise in remote work clouds plans for mass transit in NC | Opinion
What if you built a mass transit system for more commuters but more people stopped commuting?
In North Carolina’s growing urban counties, that’s a question mass transit planners didn’t anticipate. Instead, the plans for bus rapid transit, light rail and commuter rail take for granted that with an increasing population there will be an increasing number of commuters and a growing need for mass transit.
That made perfect sense until March 2020, when COVID-19 became a pandemic. Most who could work from home did. The change was supposed to last a few weeks, but for many, working from home has gone on for three years. Some office workers have returned to their cubicles, but many of those are on a hybrid home-office work schedule. By one national estimate, 18.6 million people who were commuting in 2019 were no longer doing so in 2021.
Many workers who do not need to be physically present at a workplace are never going back, and some job seekers won’t consider companies that don’t offer a remote work option. Indeed, even as the threat of COVID recedes, remote work may continue to grow. And that is making it hard to peer decades into the future to assess what should be invested in mass transit now and how much fare revenue there will be to help cover the cost.
The cloudy future of commuting is complicating transit development in North Carolina’s two largest urban areas.
In the Triangle, Wake and Durham counties are planning to use local and federal funds to build a 43-mile commuter rail line from Clayton to Durham at a cost of $3.2 billion. Charlotte is considering asking the legislature to allow a proposed one-cent county sales tax increase to be put on the ballot to support a $13.5 billion transportation plan. The plan would expand rail and bus service and add bike lanes.
North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore complicated Charlotte’s plan when he said transportation funding should go to expanding road capacity rather than alternatives such as light rail, buses and bike lanes.
“I think we really need to be looking at road construction,” Moore said during a visit to Charlotte on Jan. 9. “If you get out and you drive anywhere and 95% of people are driving a car, they are not riding a bike. They are not riding a bus. I think bus ridership after COVID is at abysmally low levels.”
Moore is half right. Mass transit ridership plunged during the pandemic, and it looks unlikely to fully recover, let alone increase. But the answer is not adding and expanding roads. Traffic studies – and the congested highways of Los Angeles and Atlanta – have made that clear.
What’s needed is an acknowledgment that remote work is making and will continue to make profound changes in society and the economy. In Raleigh and Charlotte, roughly one-third of the workforce is working remotely.
Sig Hutchinson, a former Wake County commissioner and one of the Triangle’s leading advocates for more mass transit, bike lanes and greenways, has noticed the drop in road traffic, especially on Mondays and Fridays. But he told me that creating alternatives to getting around by car is still important even if commuting patterns change.
Mass transit and bike lanes are not just about moving people from home to work, Hutchinson said, they are about building better, greener communities with denser and more affordable housing centered on transit lines that connect major job centers.
Even if remote work changes the future of commuting, the convenience of rapid transit will still have value, Hutchinson said. This is an ideal time to invest in transit projects when growth has not yet swamped the roadways and abundant federal money is available for infrastructure.
Speaking of the Triangle’s ambitious rail plan, Hutchinson said, “Twenty years from now people are going to say, ‘Thank God somebody had the vision to do commuter rail when they did because I don’t know we’d be without it.’ ”
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-829-4512, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com
