VA: Public transit staging a slow comeback from the drop in usage of the pandemic
Public transit across the country is slowly but surely recovering from sharp drop in usage during the pandemic, and Hampton Roads transportation officials on Tuesday discussed the ways they’re working to continue that trend.
Total transit usage nationally dropped by 90% in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 lockdowns, and has since increased to about 85% of its pre-pandemic level, according to Paul Skoutelas, president and CEO of the American Public Transit Association. Speaking at the biennial State of Transit conference at the Hampton Convention Center, Skoutelas touted the growth in transit usage across Hampton Roads.
Across all modes of transit, Hampton Roads saw an increase in ridership from 583,349 in October 2022 to 852,812 last month, a spike of about 46%, according to data collected by Hampton Roads Transit. The largest increase was in transit bus, which increased by 48% from October 2022 with 474,403 riders to September 2025 with 704,356.
Is this the end of the line for light rail in Hampton Roads?
Over that same period, the ridership of light rail has been much less consistent but still increased by 34% overall, from 64,537 to 86,253.
On the horizon for the nation’s transportation infrastructure is the expiration of the funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which authorized $108 billion in federal transportation funding from fiscal years 2022-26. Skoutelas emphasized that elected officials have to keep fighting for those funds to be appropriated each year and efforts have to be made to work with each new administration.
“That momentum is really positive but the weakness there is that as a country we look at five-year increments,” Skoutelas said. “We undertake projects — they take five to 10 years to develop, to plan, to design, to get good community involvement and engagement — and so the time horizon has got to be much longer than that.”
In 2026, he said, the American Public Transit Association will be calling on Congress to allocate $138 billion in new investment in public transportation and another $130 billion for freight and passenger rail over the next five years.
“I don’t think that that’s out of the question — depending on who you’re talking to, they say you’re smoking something, others say you should go higher,” he said. “I think we have a very compelling case to make that those investment levels are needed and they’re modest for what public transportation needs.”
Asked about the implications of the impending completion of the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel Expansion Project, William Harrell, president and CEO of Hampton Roads Transit, said he’s looking forward to HRT buses being able to use the high-occupancy vehicle lanes.
“We think that’s going to be important in terms of improving (the buses’) on-time performance,” Harrell said. “I think (the HRBT Expansion Project) will certainly impact the number of connections so we want to make sure from a planning perspective that we have the routes on either side of the bridge-tunnel to support appropriate development.”
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