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Unhoused on the Move: Impact of COVID-19 on Homelessness in Transit Environments

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Pandemic in the Metropolis

Part of the book series: Springer Tracts on Transportation and Traffic ((STTT,volume 20))

Abstract

More than half a million individuals experience homelessness every single night in the United States. The limited capacity of shelters to meet their needs is forcing many to turn to transit vehicles, bus stops, and transit stations for shelter. The pandemic only exacerbated the homelessness crisis. Fear of infection in shelters and reduced capacity due to physical distancing requirements drove more unhoused people to take shelter on the streets and also in transit settings. Although discussions in the popular media have raised awareness of homelessness in transit environments, the scale of the problem has not been well-documented in scholarly research. This chapter investigates the intersection of the pandemic, transit, and homelessness in U.S. cities, presenting the results of a survey of 115 transit operators on issues of homelessness on their systems, both before and during the coronavirus pandemic. We find that homelessness is broadly present across transit systems though mostly concentrated on larger transit systems and central hotspots, and it has worsened during the pandemic. The challenges of homelessness are deepening, and dedicated funding and staff are rare. Attempting to respond to the needs of homeless riders, some agencies have put forth innovative responses, including hubs of services, mobile outreach, discounted fares, and transportation to shelters.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Transit homelessness, while particularly common in North America, is also present in other countries of the Global North. In the United Kingdom, Heriot-Watt University researchers estimated that 11,950 people slept in vehicles, transit, or tents in 2017; unfortunately, the research as published does not separate out transit from these other settings [6]. In Berlin, a homeless census counted 154 people sleeping in transit stations—16% of the city’s unsheltered individuals and 8% of all people experiencing homelessness [24]. For context, Berlin, with a population of 3.77 million, had 1,976 unhoused individuals just prior to the pandemic in 2020, while the similarly sized City of Los Angeles, with a pre-pandemic population of 3.98 million, had 41,290 unhoused individuals [3, 15, 24, 26].

  2. 2.

    Broadly, transit serves a social service role of providing mobility to those who lack other means of transportation, due to poverty, disability, etc. [25]. In the context of public transit and homelessness, this social role entails serving all transit riders, even those who lack the ability to pay a fare or those who use transit for both shelter and mobility, and “treating all individuals with dignity and respect” [2, p. 5].

  3. 3.

    For questions asking for perceptions, evaluations, and opinions, we analyzed responses by individual respondent, as employees at the same agency might reasonably differ. For factual questions, the agency instead served as our primary unit of analysis. Boyle’s survey [5] only reported a single response per agency, so some comparisons (such as those in Figs. 2 and 3) compare individuals in 2020 to agencies in 2016.

  4. 4.

    These agencies were: Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York City (MTA) in New York City, New York; Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) in Los Angeles, California; Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) in San Francisco, California; King County Department of Metro Transit (King County Metro) in Seattle, Washington; San Francisco Bay Area Transit District (BART) in the San Francisco Bay Area, California; Denver Regional Transportation District (Denver RTD) in Denver, Colorado; Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (TriMet) in Portland, Oregon; Sacramento Regional Transit District (SacRT) in Sacramento, California; and City of Madison Metro Transit (Madison Metro Transit) in Madison, Wisconsin [18].

  5. 5.

    This and similar comparisons are admittedly indicative rather than definitive, because, while there was a significant overlap in the responding agencies, our survey included 115 agencies, while the survey by Boyle [5] included 55.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Ryan Caro & Hao Ding

  2. UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Jacob L. Wasserman, Ryan Caro & Hao Ding

Authors
  1. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris
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  2. Jacob L. Wasserman
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  3. Ryan Caro
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  4. Hao Ding
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Urban Planning, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris

  2. EECS, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Alexandre M. Bayen

  3. Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Giovanni Circella

  4. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    R. Jayakrishnan

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Loukaitou-Sideris, A., Wasserman, J.L., Caro, R., Ding, H. (2023). Unhoused on the Move: Impact of COVID-19 on Homelessness in Transit Environments. In: Loukaitou-Sideris, A., Bayen, A.M., Circella, G., Jayakrishnan, R. (eds) Pandemic in the Metropolis. Springer Tracts on Transportation and Traffic, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00148-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00148-2_3

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