Abstract
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent travel restrictions imposed significant impacts on many aspects of our lives and infrastructures, including an unprecedented decrease in public transit service and ridership. Little is known about specific changes in transit use during the pandemic compared to before using national-level data. In this context, we characterized transit users who changed their public transit use and identified the underlying socio-demographics, location, and trip characteristics that affect these changes using data from the recently published 2022 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). A logistic regression model developed suggests that those with a higher tendency to reduce transit use after the pandemic were females, unemployed, highly educated, teleworkers, driving license holders, couples without children, those forced to reduce travel due to conditions or disability, and those living in denser areas. In addition, users from low-income households showed greater reductions in transit use than those from high-income families. Transit agencies and planning organizations can use the findings of this study to identify transit users based on revealed changes in transit use after the pandemic to formulate appropriate operational and management strategies to address emerging public transit needs.
