杨贵妃传媒

Across the United States, transit ridership has recovered to about 71 percent of pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels. The slow ridership recovery translates into less farebox revenue and large budget gaps for the nation鈥檚 largest transit agencies when revenue support from the federal government ceased in October 2024. Ridership recovery is slower in Chicago than national averages, below 70 percent for bus and below 60 percent for rail. Our paper illuminates disparate impacts from possible service reductions in eliminating an estimated $700 million deficit in the budget for Chicago鈥檚 Regional Transportation Authority. We construct monthly mobility pattern networks from mobile phone tracing data (Dantsuji et al. 2023) and characterize the patterns before and after the pandemic across 4.4 million residential blockgroup-to-workplace blockgroup networks. We then test an empirical trip distribution model to assess importance of the share of workforce in Skilled Scalable Services occupations (Althoff et al. 2022) as a determinant of commuting flows. Our focus on the mobility networks allows us to pinpoint transit services throughout the city where continued investment might be justified for employer demand at the destination (vis-脿-vis the share of jobs that cannot work from home) or suggested by limited alternatives for mobility at the origin (vis-脿-vis low household incomes and house values among other factors).