BOSTON -- It will still be at least a week until Massachusetts starts to reopen the businesses it ordered closed in late March, but residents are starting to get out and about more as potential cases of "quarantine fatigue" set in, Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack said Monday, and transportation officials are beginning to think about what post-surge commuting might look like.
Pollack said travel is generally down 50 to 70 percent in Massachusetts and said the Department of Transportation and the governor's reopening advisory board are using a new data set -- a county-by-county estimate of vehicle miles traveled -- to track travel and understand how it is being affected by the pandemic.
"This actually estimates even deeper reductions in travel ... indicating a 70 to 80 percent statewide reduction in travel from a baseline in January," Pollack said Monday during a joint meeting of the MassDOT Board of Directors and MBTA Fiscal and Management Control Board.
But that same data set also shows that Massachusetts residents resumed some travel recently. April 27 saw roughly 27.28 million vehicles miles traveled, which was about 70 to 90 percent below the average day in January depending on county. One week later, May 4, saw 41.62 million vehicle miles traveled, an increase of more than 50 percent from April 27.
"We do seem to see the beginning of travel. We will obviously get the data for all of last week soon and we'll see if that continues," Pollack said. "There is a phenomenon that has been dubbed 'quarantine fatigue' in which people are sort of getting tired of being home. This may indicate that we are seeing some quarantine fatigue, because we are seeing an uptick in travel even though we have not begun to open the Massachusetts economy."
Pollack, who serves on the reopening advisory board that's due to file its complete report next Monday, said the group has heard from dozens of industry associations, employer organizations and others that having safe and reliable transportation will be critical to a smooth restart of economic activity.
"Almost every group that has presented to the board has raised the issue of transportation, and particularly the groups in eastern Massachusetts have raised concerns about the MBTA and how the MBTA will ramp up service and how the MBTA will be able to provide reliable service that is safe -- meaning not as crowded as it was before the pandemic," she said Monday.
That task largely falls to MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak, who reported Monday that the T has also seen a recent uptick in ridership, though it still remains at about 8.6 percent of normal on the subway system and between 20 and 22 percent of normal levels on the T's buses.
Poftak said an average of about 42,000 people tapped into gated stations last week, up about 7 percent over the previous week. Last week was also the first time since late March that the T hit an average of at least 40,000 riders on the subway each day of the week, he said. On the MBTA's bus system, Poftak said ridership averaged about 96,000 passengers last week.
With travel already on the rise and the prospect of business reopenings on the horizon, Poftak said the T is preparing to increase its level of service while continuing the station, train, bus and bus stop cleaning efforts that have been underway for weeks throughout the system. With that, the T is also "beginning to analyze the risk that transit will be seen as too crowded and what is it that we need to do to think about crowding," Poftak said.
For months, public health officials have been touting social distancing as one of the most effective ways to slow the spread of the coronavirus that's causing COVID-19. Trying to keep some empty space between each passenger -- a dream for MBTA commuters just a few months ago -- might soon become something the T tries to make a reality.
"We are taking a look at different scenarios for how ridership might return also taking into account that, given the variability across routes, that ridership is going to return at different rates for different routes," Poftak said. Using the bus system as an example, he said, "One of the measures of crowding that I think is worth talking about: if we get back to 50 percent [ridership] -- as I said, we're about 22 percent now -- if we say the vehicle capacity is 20 passengers for bus, that's going to mean that 9 percent of all weekday trips will be deemed crowded. That's a pretty significant number and obviously a challenge for us."
The 20-person capacity for buses, Poftak said, was merely an example, but it illustrates the types of issues the T has to consider. He said the T is still thinking about things like vehicle capacity, how prescriptive the transit system should be about things like reduced capacity, and how limited capacity could be enforced.
While the T might try to build in the ability to adhere to social distancing on its trains and buses, the agency is not going to require that passengers wear a mask or face covering, the GM said, even though the agency within the past week told its customers that they must wear face coverings when using the MBTA.
"We are asking everyone to wear a face covering on the MBTA, both employees and customers. There is an exception to the order for people who are unable to wear a mask due to a medical condition, and the executive order prohibits anyone from asking someone to verify their medical condition," he said. "So, on the basis of that, we really expect customers who are able to comply with this order, but we will not be refusing service to people who are not wearing face masks."
Poftak said he, Pollack and T Deputy General Manager Jeff Gonneville have been talking with their counterparts at other transit systems and that they're all trying to find the right balance between prescriptive action from a transportation system and guidance given to riders in hopes that they will make wise decisions with that information.
"I don't think anyone has actually figured out how to actually, logistically and equitably run a socially distanced transit system. Everyone is trying to figure it out right now. We're taking a peek at Asia and Europe because they're a little ahead of us," Pollack said. "But, believe me, if we had been able to find like, 'wow, they're doing it perfectly,' we would just steal it, right, and it's not there."
As they attempt to move more people each day while still guarding against the spread of a highly contagious virus, state transportation officials might have one thing going in their favor -- polls have shown that commuters might be hesitant to return to public transit.
"Pretty much every poll done -- this is one that was done by Suffolk University and published in the Boston Globe -- indicates that we have a lot of work to do to re-establish trust with the transit-riding public that the MBTA is safe," Pollack said, referring to a recent survey that showed nearly 80 percent of respondents would not be comfortable riding subways, buses and commuter trains.
If a vaccine for COVID-19 were available, that poll found that the share of people who would be comfortable riding buses, subways and commuter trains would rise to 72.4 percent, but Pollack and Poftak both noted that the polls did not ask the respondents if they were regular public transit users before the pandemic.
"I think the good news from a crowding and social distancing perspective is, assuming these polls are correct, we may see the ridership come back online relatively slowly. And that is not a bad thing, as long as the people who need the T to get where they're going have the transit service that they need," Pollack said. "On the other hand, if we have a permanent loss of transit riders, we can expect that to show up as traffic congestion."