Name: Bay Area traffic is now back in full force. Here’s a look at the data
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Bay Area traffic is now back in full force. Here’s a look at the data

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This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateA year ago, as the pandemic forced much of the Bay Area to hunker down at home, traffic seemed to vanish.With only about half the usual number of drivers crossing the Bay Area’s toll bridges, commuters still driving into work reported trans-bay trips as short as 10 minutes, and speeding became more of a problem than congestion.But as the Bay Area economy continues reopening, with more businesses, restaurants and museums welcoming back patrons, traffic is returning, too — at near pre-pandemic levels, a Chronicle analysis of Bay Area traffic data found.The increase is evident to anyone who’s driven Bay Area freeways in recent weeks. But traffic is still flowing better than before the pandemic, according to traffic experts, though they warn that won’t last.Five of the Bay Area’s eight toll bridges — the Bay, Richmond-San Rafael, Benicia-Martinez, Carquinez and Antioch — all registered better than 90% of pre-pandemic traffic levels passing through their toll plazas as of the week of March 21 of this year. One bridge, the lightly traveled Antioch, saw a 7% increase in toll-paying traffic since before the pandemic. Pre-pandemic traffic figures were collected the week of March 1, 2020.“It’s a lot more busy — a lot more,” said Cuauhtemoc Dominguez, 26, a contractor who lives in Richmond but traverses much of the Bay Area for work, including San Francisco, Concord and Sacramento. “And it’s in a lot of places, not just the Bay Bridge.”While toll counts show a resurgence of Bay Area traffic, they also indicate that the South Bay, where tech giants like Facebook and Google have kept most of their employees working at home, may be experiencing less of a rebound. The Dumbarton Bridge, whose western landing is near the Facebook campus, is carrying just 68% of the traffic it did before the pandemic. And San Mateo Bridge traffic is at 78% of its pre-pandemic level.The Golden Gate Bridge has seen 83% of its usual traffic return.John Goodwin, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which operates the toll authority, knows congestion is returning — not just from statistics but because he’s been driving from his East Bay home into work at the Bay Area Metro Center in San Francisco’s Rincon Hill neighborhood.“Without question congestion is coming back — and you see it in all the old familiar places but it doesn’t last as long and it’s not as intense” as before the pandemic, he said.The homeward-bound backup across the Bay Bridge — rated the Bay Area’s worst commute in recent years — still begins in the early afternoon, but tapers off well before sunset, he said.“By 6 o’clock or so, it’s pretty much dissipated, whereas in the before times, it would have lasted until 7 o’clock or later,” he said. “Add in a Giants game and it would be even later.”An analysis of hourly traffic across the Bay Bridge backs that up. The analysis for the week of March 21, 2021, also showed that traffic volume crossing the bridge between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. was just 55% of what it was the same week in 2019.Traffic across all of the bridges followed a similar pattern through the pandemic, dropping sharply after county health officials issued coordinated shelter-in-place orders telling workplaces to shut down and people to stay home. About three weeks later, during the first full week of April 2020, traffic bottomed out on the Bay Area bridges, according to toll figures.Other analyses also show the deep declines in traffic from different angles.Inrix, a traffic information company, reported that between February 2020 and February 2021 the number of trips into downtown San Francisco fell by 64% — one of the biggest drops in downtown district visits in the nation. The number of hours Bay Area commuters spent stuck in traffic in 2020 also fell by 51%, according to Inrix.After hitting a nadir in April 2020, traffic steadily crept up over the next two to three months, reaching around 70% then bouncing between 70% and 80%, until the start of 2021 when it began to climb toward pre-pandemic levels. Traffic on the Dumbarton and San Mateo bridges has remained flat, however.Drivers who’ve remained on the road throughout the pandemic say congestion seemed to noticeably increase over the past six weeks as San Francisco led the Bay Area in entering more permissive reopening tiers.Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.“When the tiers change, traffic gets worse — automatically,” said Omar Perez, a hot-tub delivery driver who lives in Novato. “We go all over the Bay Area, so we definitely see that.”More for youBusiness leaders believe much of the traffic is from returning workers who aren’t yet ready to board public transportation — either out of fear of exposing themselves to the coronavirus or because driving and parking is far easier than it was before the pandemic. And they worry that congestion will return, or could even grow worse if people stick to their cars when they go back to work.“We expect traffic to come back at least as bad as it was before,” said Jason Baker, vice president of transportation, health and housing for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which represents 350 employers, primarily in the tech sector.“We fear it could come back even worse if we don’t encourage people to get back on transit and if people don’t keep up the biking and walking they adopted during the pandemic,” he said.With many workers likely to stay at home some days and trek into the office on others, Baker and Jim Wunderman, CEO of the Bay Area Council, a business group, said this may be the time for companies to consider adjusting or even coordinating work schedules — with some workers commuting on Monday and Tuesday and others on Wednesday and Thursday, for example.For now, though, even as traffic rises, most workers remain more focused on the coronavirus, getting vaccinations and wondering what conditions will be like when they return to their workplace, Wunderman said. But he expects they’ll soon be confronted with the familiar reality of traffic congestion, which could drive a return to transit.“I have a feeling we’re going to hit a point, maybe six months or nine months from now, where people are going to say ‘I remember this’ — and it’s going to be bad.”Michael Cabanatuan and Nami Sumida are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: , Twitter: ,Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateA year ago, as the pandemic forced much of the Bay Area to hunker down at home, traffic seemed to vanish.With only about half the usual number of drivers crossing the Bay Area’s toll bridges, commuters still driving into work reported trans-bay trips as short as 10 minutes, and speeding became more of a problem than congestion.But as the Bay Area economy continues reopening, with more businesses, restaurants and museums welcoming back patrons, traffic is returning, too — at near pre-pandemic levels, a Chronicle analysis of Bay...

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Michael Cabanatuan is a general assignment, breaking news reporter. He previously covered all things transportation for the San Francisco Chronicle — from BART strikes, acrobatic bridge construction and dark dirty tunnel excavations to the surging ridership on public transportation and the increasing conflict as cars, bikes and pedestrians struggle to coexist on the streets.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/author/michael-cabanatuan/

Michael Cabanatuan

Nami Sumida

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Bay Area traffic is now back in full force. Here’s a look at the data

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