[ghaff]

It does seem to vary. The few times I've commuted into Boston over the past six months or so both traffic and transit usage seemed to be pretty much back to pre-pandemic levels as was pedestrian activity within the city. SF seems to be at least something of an outlier presumably because tech is something of a bubble.

In general, I'd observe that there's been much more of a reset to pre-pandemic norms than many anticipated. But SF could well end up being something of an anomaly--which would be especially bad news for SF given it may not be a broad-based crisis that the government at the national (or maybe even state) level is going to be especially concerned about.

[lukemercado]

> In general, I'd observe that there's been much more of a reset to pre-pandemic norms than many anticipated.

I haven't traveled well enough recently to agree or disagree, but this matches my reading, so I'll take your argument.

> But SF could well end up being something of an anomaly--which would be especially bad news for SF given it may not be a broad-based crisis that the government at the national (or maybe even state) level is going to be especially concerned about.

Yeah... That's why I think we're somewhere between Theories 3 and 4. I was really hoping that the city supervisors would see that and start shifting SF's office core to be a more desirable and exciting place by reducing the barriers to entry for new brick and mortar businesses. Think more streets shut to cars, more bike only roads, massively more efficient and cheaper stall and cart permitting along with expanded areas of operation. Roll this together and you could essentially crawl the existing temporary street markets around the Ferry Building into the urban core. This would also provide an avenue for businesses to start and grow to fill the empty retail in the buildings around them, much the same that food trucks have become a stepping stone to brick and mortar restaurants.

[ghaff]

>I haven't traveled well enough recently to agree or disagree, but this matches my reading, so I'll take your argument.

Yeah, it's not just return to office. I was at KubeCon in Amsterdam last week and it was the largest KubeCon Europe ever with 10K in-persona attendees. Add the 2K who wanted to go and couldn't get in and it was almost 2x the attendance of KubeCon in Valencia a year ago. (And that's in an environment where a lot of tech companies have cut back on travel spend.) So, nope, nope, conferences aren't all going virtual.

And, although I don't have numbers, I'm pretty sure that a lot of the food and grocery delivery and other services that really soared during the pandemic have probably largely returned to earlier levels.

[dublinben]

That seems unlikely, since annual averages are about 50% of pre-2020 office occupancy. Public Transportation data also shows volume at roughly half of pre-pandemic normal.

However, commuter rail has recovered less than other modes, so if some of those people are now driving to their office instead, then they will be making traffic worse than it would have been at an equivalent pre-pandemic office occupancy volume.

https://www.kastle.com/safety-wellness/getting-america-back-...

https://www.mbta.com/performance-metrics/ridership-the-t

[ghaff]

>However, commuter rail has recovered less than other modes, so if some of those people are now driving to their office instead, then they will be making traffic worse

There's probably some of that. At one point I took commuter rail after traffic seemed as bad as ever and it was pretty empty. But last time I took commuter rail in during December, it was back to standing room only again from about Waltham. (That said, I think the schedule is still reduced relative to pre-pandemic which both skews the perception of how many people are taking the train and makes the train a less attractive option.)

I'm honestly not sure though how to square the number of cars apparently on the road at rush hour with reduced office occupancy. Some of it is probably day sensitivity (more people commuting mid-week than Monday/Friday) given that occupancy--depending on how it's measured--than actual office vacancy which is high but at 18% not that high.