Since March of 2020, COVID-19 has been impacting TriMet ridership, and since late May of 2020 riots have added their impact. Even if COVID-19 were to have a minimized impact as an active outbreak, patterns of work-at-home and a lingering comfort in social distancing for some are likely to continue, and these will impact ridership.

When the stay-at-home order was announced by Governor Brown in March 2020, the first social distancing restrictions were put in place and many people began working from home. Weekly TriMet ridership dropped from February levels by around 60% by the end of March 2020. Ridership has continued to stay well below 2019’s numbers throughout the rest of the year, impacted not only by the initial surge of the pandemic, but by the dramatic rise in the state’s positive COVID cases in November and December, the wildfire smoke in September and our Steel Bridge MAX Improvements project in August 2020.

TriMet has required employees and riders to wear face coverings on board since May 2020. They have distributed more than 3.7 million disposable masks since May 2020.

According to TriMet, "From the start of the pandemic, TriMet quickly made changes to help keep our riders and employees safe. While we had cleaned our vehicles to some degree nightly, in March we began disinfecting all buses, MAX trains, WES trains and LIFT paratransit vehicles every night. We hired more than 150 people to help with the elevated cleaning efforts and purchased equipment such as electrostatic sprayers and fogging machines to help us do this more effectively and efficiently."




--Staff Reports

Post Date: 2021-11-28 14:55:43

Last Update: 2021-11-28 15:29:59