The most persistent effect of COVID is that people found out they could work just as well at home and avoid hours of commuting. The effect on transportation and urban life in the Bay Area is dramatic. Perhaps the most affected is BART and downtown San Francisco.. BART ridership remains down at only 38% of pre-COVID level. There were 8,000 daily boardings and off-boardings in Richmond pre-COVID; now there are only 2,259.

According to the articles below, San Francisco has the equivalent of 20 Salesforce Towers of office space available, and commute times in the San Francisco Bay Area have shortened the most in the country since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. San Franciscans who commute to work had an average of 6.4 minutes shaved off their daily travel time in 2021 compared to 2019, according to U.S. Census data analyzed by Axios. This is primarily due to the increase in remote work brought on by the pandemic. 

Last month’s data show that Caltrain has recovered just 29% of its pre-pandemic ridership. BART ridership has demonstrated a slightly stronger ridership recovery, reaching an all-time high of pre-pandemic ridership last month at 41%. WETA Ferry ridership experienced the greatest decline in ridership at the peak of the pandemic, dropping to 1% ridership in April 2020. Now, ferry ridership boasts the largest ridership recovery at 62% (http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/bay-watch-return-to-transit/).

As transit ridership makes a slow recovery, traffic volumes tell a different story. At the peak of the pandemic, toll tags across all seven state-owned toll bridges fell to only 51% of their pre-pandemic levels. Since then, bridge crossings have remained largely between 80-95% of their pre-pandemic levels. As of last month, bridge crossings across all bridges are at 92%, illustrating that people who are commuting are choosing to drive alone or carpool, rather than take transit. And while remote work initially appeared a temporary solution, many Bay Area workers never returned to the office and do not plan to. According to a recent September 2022 poll of employers conducted by the Bay Area Council, 44% of those surveyed reported downsizing or consolidating office space following the pandemic and 73% of respondents reported their employees currently come in three or less days a week. Employers also reported that of their employees who come into the office, an estimated 30% take public transit compared to 51% pre-pandemic (http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/bay-watch-return-to-transit/).

If this trend continues, it brings both challenges and opportunities for transportation planners and urban planners.

Commute times in the San Francisco Bay Area have shortened the most in the country since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, new U.S. Census data shows. 

San Franciscans who commute to work had an average of 6.4 minutes shaved off their daily travel time in 2021 compared to 2019, according to U.S. Census data analyzed by Axios. This is primarily due to the increase in remote work brought on by the pandemic. 

Data from the Census Bureau's 2021 American Community Survey shows that the number of people working from home tripled between 2019 and 2021, from 5.7% to 17.9% of workers, or roughly 9 million to 27.6 million people. Among metro areas with populations of a million or more residents, the Bay Area had the highest percentage of remote workers — the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro areas had about 35% of its workforce primarily working from home. The Census Bureau attributes this to the area's strong links to the information and technology sectors. 

This shift has caused a decrease of nearly 15 million people who commute to work alone by private vehicle, survey data shows. Commuting via public transportation also fell by about half. 

The city that came closest to San Francisco's decrease in commute times was Boston, with 5.8 minutes cut from residents' daily commutes. Next was Washington, D.C., with a decrease of 4.6 minutes, and Baltimore, with a decrease of 4 minutes. 

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/san-francisco-commute-times-decrease-17525720.php

San Francisco has 27.1 million square feet of office space available across the city, a record high, according to new data recently released by commercial real estate firm CBRE. If you need a visualization of that staggering number, that’s just over 20 Salesforce Tower’s worth of office space available — and SF’s tallest building has 1.35 million square feet of office space across its 59 floors.

If leasing activity keeps pace with its current trajectory, upcoming quarters could continue to get worse, given that 50% of current sublease space is set to expire in 2025. “The vacancy rate is going to continue to creep up over the next couple of quarters because demand remains subdued right now and that all relates to the uncertainty around the economy and the amount of space companies need,” said Colin Yasukochi, CBRE’s Executive Director of Tech Insights.

Mayor London Breed spoke about her concerns with the city's high office vacancy rate last week in an interview with Bloomberg News. The remote work policies of tech companies are part of the problem, Breed said. She pointed to Salesforce as an example. “[Marc is] very supportive of the city, continues to contribute that support to schools and to other great causes, but the building is empty, and that’s a real problem,” Breed said.

Empty buildings depress property values, which affects the amount the city makes in property tax revenue. Workers are also using public transportation at lower rates, and are spending less on goods at local businesses since they spend more time inside their homes.

Breed plans to coax businesses in growing industries, such as biotechnology and green technology, to fill empty office space.

Meanwhile, asking rents on directly leased space haven’t budged much. Rental prices are down just 2.6% compared to the first quarter of the year, though it’s down 13% from an all-time high in 2019. Yasukochi said he thinks that’s the most interesting takeaway from the new data. “It's somewhat of an anomaly because normally high supply and low demand usually means prices are coming down, and we haven’t really seen that much of that,” he said.

When broken down by neighborhood, the highest vacancy rate according to CBRE is the Yerba Buena district at 46.1%. (CBRE defines Yerba Buena as bounded by Market to the north, Bryant to the south, Third Street to the east and Sixth Street to the west). The neighborhood with the lowest vacancy rate was Mission Bay/China Basin at 18.1%.

Interestingly, Yerba Buena has the highest average asking rent of all the commercial districts, but at $82.45 per square foot, it’s only cents above Mission Bay/China Basin’s average asking rent of $82.28.

The rental market is often bolstered by big office deals from tech companies, but San Franciso saw no new deals over 100,000 square feet in the third quarter of the year. Furthermore, the big tenants that do occupy space that large have decreased to five, down from nine in the second quarter of the year. Planet Labs, an Earth imaging company, completed the largest lease renewal of last quarter, while software company Asana signed the biggest sublease.

“From what our economists are seeing, the [market] turnaround will probably be during the middle of next year, but keeping in mind that real estate tends to lag the overall economy a bit,”  Yasukochi said. “So it's probably not until the latter half of 2023 and into 2024 that we’ll really start to see sustained improvement in the market.”

SFGATE reporter Alec Regimbal contributed to this report.