The purpose of this thesis was to investigate public concerns related to public transportation usage due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. The goal was to gain a better understanding of health and safety concerns of the public for three modes of public transportation; Commuter Rail, Subway/Underground Rail, and Bus, and to use this information to predict public transportation demand in a post- COVID-19 world. A survey of 1,000 United States residents was conducted through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing survey tool to probe public opinion regarding these issues. Data cleaning resulted in a sample size of 520 participants for analysis. The findings of this study is that there is a high level of public concern for public transportation usage since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a decrease in predicted public transportation ridership after the COVID-19 pandemic according to the survey results. Lastly, there are not large differences in level of concern among demographic sub-groups and there are no strong financial predictors of level of concern.
