CA: Bay Area workers are returning to office, but most aren't taking transit, new data shows

Workers are steadily returning to the office, but most of them are not using transit to get there, according to new data from the Bay Area Council business association.

The council's latest Return to Office survey, part of a four-year effort to track work and commute habits in a region still recovering from COVID lockdowns, showed a hybrid work model that has kept people attached to their cars. While 63% of respondents said they worked in the office part time as of February — a significant increase from the 44% who were hybrid in October 2021 — fewer than half took public transportation.

More than 200 companies that participated in the survey said that 46% of their employees took transit to work "at least some of the time," up from 35% in January 2024. Meanwhile, traffic on the Bay Bridge has fully rebounded, according to data from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

Other studies underscore that finding. A recent report from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority revealed that freeway congestion is back to pre-pandemic levels during evening rush hour.

"If you're just commuting one or two days a week, maybe there's more of a willingness to fight that traffic," said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and a lead author of the Return to Office survey.

A high tolerance for traffic might not indicate a shift in mentality, but rather, a reversion to past behavior. Numbers from MTC suggest that Bay Area commuters always depended on automobiles. Back in 2019, the vast majority — 73% — drove to work alone or in a carpool. Of the remaining workers, 13% took transit, 7% worked from home, 4% walked and 3% took some other mode, such as a scooter or bicycle.

The Bay Area Council survey represents a narrower group of employees who mostly work in San Francisco or Silicon Valley. By and large, they have more transit options than people commuting in other parts of the region. But they no longer rely heavily on transit.

"People are returning to work, and they are returning first to their cars," said John Goodwin, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. All the same, he noted that comparing 2019 with 2025 is fraught. In the post-pandemic world, many people have flexible schedules and aren't tethered to their desks from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. So they may never feel the full force of rush hour traffic.

"Congestion on all the usual routes is consistent, and it is frustrating," Goodwin said. "But it is not unendurable."

As a result, many agencies have struggled to lure riders back. Chief among them is BART, which served 400,000 trips each weekday before the pandemic, and now hovers at 170,000.

"Most people who rode BART before the pandemic are riding BART today, but they're riding less frequently," said Edward Wright, a board director for the agency whose district spreads through San Francisco. "The challenge is what does BART look like in a world where people don't go to the office five days a week?"

Bellisario is optimistic that more people will gravitate to in-person work incrementally. And over time, he and Goodwin predicted, the crush of traffic and bridge tolls will nudge people onto trains or buses.

Still, we'll probably never restore the Bay Area of 2019. No amount of wellness circles or free snacks can surmount the appeal and convenience of remote work.

"If this is the new normal, if we expect our downtowns to be 40 to 50% of what they were, then it's interesting to think about how we might adjust service," Bellisario said. One option, he mused, would be to move some transit infrastructure into the suburbs if that's where people are spending their time.

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