Transit, especially rail transit, in most places is office-worker and CBD-oriented, the place most affected by WfH. Even in Sydney Australia, morning commute train use is at 70% of pre-pandemic. (Overall transit is 82% in Sydney, because buses and weekends are doing better). Melbourne is doing even worse (78% of pre-pandemic levels overall). Behaviour has shifted, transit is for obvious reasons slow to react. Bad urban planning doesn't help, but even the relatively good planning of Sydney or Melbourne cannot stop technological shifts.
'Asynchronisation' still has its limits: people normally sleep during the night, work during the day, and have to find the time to socialise with each other. Not everyone, but most people do all these things. Whether some people are involved in working globally across the time zones does not matter much for the local outcomes of it, as under normal circumstances socialisation would remain localised.
If the shift of a relatively limited number of workers to flexible and work-from-home arrangements puts a transit system into facing existential risk, it is not a problem of transit but how it is funded, how it is managed, how its purpose is defined and what is expected of it.
To me it looks like the discourse with regards to dying downtowns and the transit systems facing fiscal cliffs remains pretty much uniquely North American, and the reasons for that remain the same: (bad) urban planning.
Transit, especially rail transit, in most places is office-worker and CBD-oriented, the place most affected by WfH. Even in Sydney Australia, morning commute train use is at 70% of pre-pandemic. (Overall transit is 82% in Sydney, because buses and weekends are doing better). Melbourne is doing even worse (78% of pre-pandemic levels overall). Behaviour has shifted, transit is for obvious reasons slow to react. Bad urban planning doesn't help, but even the relatively good planning of Sydney or Melbourne cannot stop technological shifts.
'Asynchronisation' still has its limits: people normally sleep during the night, work during the day, and have to find the time to socialise with each other. Not everyone, but most people do all these things. Whether some people are involved in working globally across the time zones does not matter much for the local outcomes of it, as under normal circumstances socialisation would remain localised.
If the shift of a relatively limited number of workers to flexible and work-from-home arrangements puts a transit system into facing existential risk, it is not a problem of transit but how it is funded, how it is managed, how its purpose is defined and what is expected of it.
To me it looks like the discourse with regards to dying downtowns and the transit systems facing fiscal cliffs remains pretty much uniquely North American, and the reasons for that remain the same: (bad) urban planning.