5 charts and 1 map that explain how COVID-19 dramatically reshaped the Bay Area commute

Here’s how the pandemic radically changed commuting for all of us.

Nearly a million Bay Area workers switched to working from home. Commute times dropped by 10 minutes or more in many portions of the Bay Area. Our commuter trains are less than half as crowded as they used to be. But beware: There are signs the congestion on our freeways is creeping back, just at different times and certain days of the week when many of us do choose to head into the office.

Here are six big takeaways to help explain what’s happened to the Bay Area commute.

Staying home to work is here to stay

The impact from our shift to remote work has been staggering. From 2019 to 2021, the number of Bay Area residents who said they worked from home shot up more than five times, topping 1.1 million.

And while updated data from the U.S. Census Bureau isn’t available yet, there’s no sign the remote work revolution ended with the pandemic.

The Bay Area Council Economic Institute, an economic policy think tank, has consistently found that the number of employers who require workers to be in the office 5 days a week or more has hovered around 25% since 2021, according to one of the institute’s research managers Abby Raisz.

The five-county region’s 1.5 million solo drivers still account for the largest group of Bay Area commuters, but their numbers dropped by one-quarter after the pandemic. Public transit took an even bigger hit: The total share of workers who take public transit dropped by nearly three-quarters, from around 15% in 2019 to just 4% by 2021.

And the next chart shows: They don’t appear to be coming back.

Hundreds of thousands quit BART

BART has become the poster child for the post-pandemic public transit crisis. In June, weekday ridership was around 40% of what it was for the same month in 2019.

The colossal COVID collapse in Bay Area transit riders has led to a state bailout plan backed by bridge toll hikes as federal pandemic relief money runs out and agencies like BART are threatening major cuts in service that would even further undermine a rider comeback.

Olivia Atkinson of Oakland is one of the commuters who gave up on BART and started driving into work. Atkinson, who now works as a private courier delivering optical products like eyeglasses and California lottery tickets in the Hayward area, decided to stop taking BART in large part because the COVID-19 pandemic opened her eyes to how gross riding BART could be.

“People are nasty, I’m sorry… People would sneeze on their hand and put it right on the rail,” Atkinson said. “COVID definitely made me realize a lot of things.”

Commute times improved everywhere, for just about everyone.

Most commuters throughout the Bay Area saw a major reduction in their time on the road from 2019 to 2021, the most recent year for which figures are available, with many saving 10 minutes or more each way from some of the country’s most frustrating freeway journeys.

But still, commuters in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metro area still had some of the longest commutes in the nation in 2021, averaging about 29 minutes each way, according to American Community Survey data. The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area fared slightly better, at 24 minutes on average.

But experts warn that if commuters continue to abandon public transit en masse, or if services are cut, it could very well make traffic a whole lot worse in the areas where the use of rail alternatives is common, like in the East Bay.

Remote work liberates some from commuting. But disadvantaged groups were left behind

Remote workers may not care if morning commutes get longer, since they can just roll out of bed and call into their Zoom meetings.

But the pool of remote workers is composed disproportionately of the most-advantaged groups of people, suggesting that the work-from-home phenomenon is exacerbating inequality, and disadvantaging those who still commute.

White workers worked from home at nearly 2.5 times the rate as Hispanic workers in 2021. Meanwhile, workers with a Master’s degree worked from home at 4.5 times the rate compared to those with just a high school diploma. Experts say that these staggering differences highlight how the rise of remote work has had little impact on sectors like the service industry where Hispanic workers and people without college degrees tend to be overrepresented.

“The Latino population is much younger than any other racial group,” Raisz said. And young workers, “they’re going off to get your typical service worker job… that would not allow you to be remote in any way.”

Among those who do still commute, Black workers have the longest commute times compared to all other racial groups in the Bay Area, averaging around 30 minutes each way.

Rush-hour backups are back — but at different times and days

Perhaps nobody is in a better position to explain the changes to our post-COVID commute than KQED traffic reporter Joe McConnell, who has been monitoring the Bay Area’s rush hour for more than 30 years.

“At its peak, it’s still bad,” he said. “But it’s more focused on an intense couple of hours in the morning.”

He’s noticed that traffic jams on the Bay Bridge seem to clear up a little earlier after the morning rush, at around 8 a.m., when it used to take until 9:30, and he rarely sees those backups reach the maze from the toll plaza anymore, which used to be a common occurrence.

Indeed, the data shows more vehicles are crossing the Bay Bridge from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. in the middle of the week — those days that hybrid workers typically head to the office — than were doing so pre-pandemic, but way fewer are crossing in the super early morning. Overall the number of bridge-crossers at other times of day continues to be lower than 2019 averages, except Friday afternoon when more people are driving into the city than in 2019, likely for entertainment. Many of those drivers used to take BART.

McConnell, who pores over traffic maps and data each day from his home broadcast studio, has his own way to adapt to the monumental shift in the Bay Area commute. “I avoid driving as much as possible.”