Eric Young, a spokesperson for the SFCTA, said while traffic in some areas of San Francisco have reached pre-pandemic levels, some have yet to see that level of congestion again.Ĭars navigate the tollbooths at the Bay Bridge in Oakland. The San Francisco County Transportation Authority developed the Covid-Era Congestion Tracker, which shows how congestion in San Francisco has changed since March 2020. “I think it speaks to a little different customer base at those bridges than others.” “Particularly as connectors between the East Bay and Silicon Valley tech jobs, the big employers on the west end of those bridges were better positioned for a more remote work environment,” he said. The Dumbarton bridge especially was the “first to slump and the slowest to rebound,” he added.Įchoing TomTom’s analysts, Goodwin said high-tech workers’ ability to work remotely from home is likely the explanation. The Dumbarton and San Mateo-Hayward bridges, which connect the South Bay to the East Bay, particularly saw a hit in the early days of the pandemic. “Our traffic levels on the toll bridges, very broadly speaking, were lower in mid-January than they were in mid-December.” “Ordinarily we look for a post-holiday rebound in toll bridge traffic, but that didn’t happen this year,” Goodwin said. But starting in mid-December during the omicron surge, bridge traffic declined, and it has not yet rebounded, he said. He said traffic started to approach pre-pandemic levels last summer, after the state for the most part reopened. A look at the past two years shows “we are not where we were in the 2019 period,” he said, with the change particularly noticeable on the Bay, Richmond-San Rafael, San Mateo-Hayward and Dumbarton bridges. The Bay Area’s major bridges are more or less seeing the same pattern, said John Goodwin, spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. city to make the top 50 - indicating that “there’s definitely been a shift in how Americans commute and live.” He added that based on worldwide rankings, New York was the only U.S. “Those cities, like San Jose and San Francisco, that are predominantly made up of people who can do their job from home are seeing that traffic is slow to return.”īrouwer said the same pattern is happening among big tech hubs worldwide, with those cities experiencing the biggest decreases in congestion levels. “Each city has a bit of a unique story because the pandemic has impacted everyone a bit differently,” he said. “Drivers in San Jose have definitely changed their habits,” Brouwer said. Before the pandemic, San Jose was also one of the most congested cities in the country. “This can partly be explained by the fact that working from home for employees in the tech industry is easier than working from home for employees of another industry.”īrouwer noted that San Francisco saw an uptick in congestion last year by five percentage points, but still remains well below its 2019 average. “In some cities, particularly on the East Coast, traffic is very close to mirroring what it looked like in 2019, but the Bay Area is still experiencing congestion levels that are far less than what we saw on average in 2019,” wrote Jeroen Brouwer, program manager and traffic expert at TomTom, in an email. What exactly is fueling the trend in the Bay Area, a region notorious in recent decades for highway gridlock and grueling commutes? The mostly likely factor is its tech-heavy workforce, according to TomTom. By that measure, San Francisco’s average congestion level was 26% in 2021, compared to 36% in 2019. TomTom calculates congestion levels based on how much more time it takes for someone to complete a trip compared with uncongested conditions. The city’s big Bay Area neighbor to the south, San Jose, saw a much larger decline, with its traffic congestion ranking dropping all the way to No.
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