'It's time to open our city'
The last major pandemic-related restrictions are going away this week in New York City after Mayor Eric Adams announced Friday that K-12 school are dropping their mask requirements and private businesses won’t need to require patrons are masked or vaccinated.
“It’s time to open our city,” the Democratic mayor said, as I reported in The Wall Street Journal.
Adams and other civic leaders are hoping that tourists and white-collar workers will return to Manhattan and the city’s other business districts to help prime the pump on economic recovery. Many people (present company included!) have been working fully or mostly remotely for the last two years, which means we’re not buying tossed salads for lunch, fancy coffees with friends or cocktails after hours.
The decline in demand for these services is one reason why New York City’s unemployment rate is 8.8% compared to 3.9% nationally, as Greg David noted last week in The City. More employers are mandating a return to office, but with a tight labor market there’s concern about fully killing off the hybrid work model. Office occupancy was just over 30% in late February in the New York metropolitan area, according to swipe card data compiled by Kastle Systems. The world is too interesting to stay home all the time, New York Times columnist Ginia Bellafante argues, but it remains to be seen if this sentiment will carry the day.
My colleague Scott Calvert and I examined some data that indicate a potentially permanent shift: ridership on commuter rail systems. Railroads serving Boston and California are shifting to a regional rail model, where trains run hourly throughout the day and aren’t stacked up in the morning and evening rush hours. Ridership on Metra, which serves Chicago, is at 25% of pre-pandemic levels.
Sales of monthly passes at the three commuter railroads serving New York City—the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Railroad and New Jersey Transit—fell more than 95% early in the pandemic. Since then, sales haven’t exceeded 30% of pre-pandemic levels, according to an analysis of ticketing data, while ridership on LIRR and Metro North is around 50% of pre-pandemic levels.
Ticketing data show that the number of 10-trip passes exceeded pre-pandemic levels before Omicron hit, and the MTA last week rolled out a 20-trip ticket that seeks to capture people who once shelled-out for an unlimited monthly pass — the traditional backbone of the systems’ fare revenue.
“We’re trying to get our riders back by offering new fare products that may be attuned to the new hybrid-work schedule,” MTA Chairman Janno Lieber said at a recent press conference.
Adams, who announced the end of the restrictions during a press conference in Times Square, said it was a happy event and that people should start enjoying the city again. Covid cases and hospitalizations are as low as they were last summer, and more and more people are vaccinated.
“We’ve become a city of nos. I want to become a city of excitement,” he said, a moment after buskers dressed as Elmo, Grover and Luigi shuffled by behind him. “We are winning, folks!”
COMING UP: New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy gives a budget address this week. In New York, lawmakers are coming up with their own counter-proposals to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s budget. They also agreed there’s even more revenue than they initially thought.
A QUESTION: Where, if anywhere, are you still wearing a facemask if it is not explicitly required?
Have an answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: The last former New York state senator to be elected mayor of New York City was Jimmy Walker, whose run at City Hall ended in scandal. David Dinkins was the last mayor to have served in the state Assembly.