The raised platforms and steel benches were deserted alongside the light-rail tracks that run through the downtown streets of San Jose, Calif.
The large convenience store, where workers and students pop in to grab sodas and protein bars while waiting for the next train, was empty. The wide, tree-lined avenue was quiet, but for jazz music emanating from an abandoned sandwich shop.
It was the afternoon rush hour, a time when riders normally would be congregating to catch their trains home. But by this point, more than two weeks after buses and trains disappeared from the San Jose region, residents had become resigned to life without public transit.
In San Jose and the Silicon Valley, an unusually prolonged strike provided a rare glimpse into what might happen if major transit agencies fail to recover their footing after the Covid-19 pandemic. Nationwide, providers have warned of severe cuts to service, which would mean shutting down routes and closing stations without more passengers or government subsidies.
The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which serves nearly 100,000 passengers daily, had to shut down its buses and trains for 18 days after workers seeking pay raises walked off the job. The strike ended only when a judge forced employees to return, enabling limited bus service to resume on Friday and light-rail trains to return next week.
But even when the system comes back to life, it will have its challenges. Ridership in the San Jose region, as in other major U.S. cities, has never returned to what it was before the pandemic.
So the absence of V.T.A. trains and buses this month became a possible harbinger of a future without transit. In the tech-driven San Francisco Bay Area, where a particularly high share of workers have remained remote, that future isn’t just a hypothetical. (San Jose, after all, is the home of Zoom Communications, the videoconferencing platform that helped remote work go into overdrive during the pandemic.)
Nearby, Bay Area Rapid Transit has lost more than half of the ridership it had before the pandemic, more than any other major system in the nation. BART is facing such difficulty that its leaders have warned of not only ending weekend operations and reducing train frequency, but also ending service altogether. This week, California legislators introduced a bill to put a sales tax measure on local ballots to rescue the flagging agency.
Across the United States, transit agencies have been struggling to bring back customers since bus and subway use plummeted in 2020.
Overall, American transit systems have about 80 percent of their prepandemic passenger counts, according to the American Public Transportation Association. Some have recovered better than others; the Metropolitan Transportation Agency in New York has roughly 85 percent of its prepandemic passengers, while the numbers for systems in Chicago and Boston hover around 70 percent.
Besides remote work, transit agencies have to overcome perceptions that their systems are less safe than they once were. Brazen attacks in Los Angeles and New York have alarmed residents, and transit crime rates rose after the pandemic.
And grant funding has become less reliable as state governments face their own financial challenges while the Trump administration has shown little inclination to aid transit systems. Last week, Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, threatened to cut funding from the M.T.A. in New York if its leaders could not show how they were addressing crime.
Many systems are racing to reinvent themselves and have experimented with eliminating fares, offering subsidized Uber and Lyft rides, creating their own on-demand service and investing in housing and retail shops at dozens of transit stations.
V.T.A. serves San Jose, the largest city in Northern California, and surrounding Silicon Valley — one of the most expensive places in the country. Its ridership is roughly 80 percent of what it was before the pandemic.
The system’s workers, represented by Amalgamated Transit Union Local 265, went on strike on March 10 following a contract dispute over wages and working conditions. The strike involved 1,500 people who work as bus drivers, light-rail operators, maintenance staff, dispatchers, fare inspectors and more.
Victor Oseguera, an electromechanical technician for the city’s light-rail system, wore a sun hat and a neon vest as he participated in a rally this week on a San Jose street corner.
Mr. Oseguera, 56, said that workers need raises to keep up with prices. He lives about 120 miles away in a Sacramento suburb because of its lower cost of living, and his own commute is two hours each way by car. The transit agency has offered 11 percent wage increases over three years, and the union has asked for 18 percent.
“We’re all losing money out here,” said Mr. Oseguera, who has worked for V.T.A. for 23 years. “We’re not being greedy.”
Matt Mahan, the San Jose mayor and vice chairman of the V.T.A. board, said in an interview that while workers were dealing with high living costs, he considered their demands “unrealistic” given the agency’s $40 million deficit in a $600 million operating budget.
“We’re pushing this agency toward obsolescence if we cave to unreasonable demands,” Mr. Mahan said.
Adam Cohen, a senior researcher at the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University, said that prolonged transit outages could keep some riders away in the long term, if they find alternatives. That could spell additional financial trouble for V.T.A. in the coming months, he said.
“Once people get into a new routine, it might be very hard to bring those people back to transit and back to V.T.A. in particular — it’s bad for business,” said Mr. Cohen. “It’s great that people have mobility options to get around, but we’ve seen disruptions previously, whether it’s earthquakes or other types of natural disasters, and it’s pretty hard for agencies to recover.”
In San Jose, riders have become resourceful in finding other ways to get around, relying on car-pooling, biking or using ride-hailing services.
Monica Mallon, 27, has regularly relied on buses and light-rail trains to commute from San Jose to her job at a senior housing agency in Santa Clara. She normally pays $90 per month for a V.T.A. pass.
During the strike, she paid $30 for Uber rides a few times. But she can’t afford to do that regularly, she said.
Lately, she has tried another option: walking the 11-mile route to or from work.
“My 45-minute, pretty reasonable commute has at times turned into a 3.5-hour walk,” said Ms. Mallon, who spoke to The Times as she began trudging home at 7:30 p.m.
Mr. Oseguera acknowledged the potential downsides of the 18-day strike and riders potentially not returning to V.T.A. He said he worried about falling ridership after V.T.A. worked so hard to draw back riders after the pandemic and after a deadly mass shooting at one of V.T.A.’s light-rail yards in 2021.
“Nobody really wants to be on strike,” he said.
Students at San Jose State University, which is largely a commuter school, are paying more to get to campus, and some have said they can’t afford to make it to class at all. Local school districts have contracted with private bus companies to transport high school students who normally rely on V.T.A. At the BART station in North San Jose, strangers are sharing cabs into San Jose to save money.
Billy Hassan, a cashier at One-Stop Market, next to a normally busy light-rail stop in San Jose, said that business had dropped by 40 percent since the strike began.
Megan Rahib, 22, was working at a cookie shop a few blocks away, across from another empty light-rail station. Sales have dropped slightly there, too, she said.
Ms. Rahib, a marketing student at San Jose State University, said that she gets a free transit pass through the school. She typically uses it to take a bus to the nearest BART station — about four miles from downtown San Jose — to head into San Francisco or elsewhere to see her friends. But instead she’s had to take Uber rides to the BART station, and each one has cost about $15, which seriously cuts into her earnings from the shop.
She said she was looking forward to service returning, not just to save money but also because the trains had become part of her daily routine at work.
“I miss watching the trains go by,” she said.
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