The COVID lockdown meant few to no passengers on buses, which was difficult for driver Luis Lopez, who was used to greeting his riders at every stop.

“I had no one around me," Lopez said. "It was sad. It was depressing. I had to look in the mirror to keep my mind going, and I looked at myself. I put a smile on my own face.”

Interaction with riders was a double-edged sword.

“I had to strip down, and then jump in the shower, before I can even say hello, and it was sad," Lopez said. "And there were days where nobody will hug me, nobody would kiss me. And that's so depressing, because you felt alone."

Taxi driver Naider Henry had the same worries, but the concerns were economic as well. He and many others were lucky to get 10 or 20 trips a day, when a pre-pandemic day was closer to 50.

“Everybody have to wear a mask, everybody got to have sanitizer," Henry said. "I’m gonna disinfect the car, and you can go to work. But I go to work, and the city is a ghost town.”

Except for essential workers dependent on taxis and public transit. So much was unknown, and former transit leader Sarah Feinberg says they listened to medical experts.

“If a conductor or train operator ended up testing positive, not only would we send that person home until they’re better, but we were sending everyone around that person home for two weeks," Feinberg said. "And so we lost the 2 line for days.”

Feinberg says they had to come up with several plans.

“If things got truly horrible and dire where you could shut down the subway, and use it as a tool to keep people home, and we wrote a bus plan that would move doctors and nurses to buses on bus routes," she said. "That was that as dark as it got.”

But there were other dark days ahead, despite the mask-wearing and the social distancing, the subways shut down overnight to disinfect, the back-of-bus boarding and curtains installed to protect bus drivers. Almost 200 workers died through October 2022.

“I called every single family, and sometimes they wanted to talk to me and sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they wanted to talk to me for a really long time and tell me about their, you know, their family member,” Feinberg recalled. 

And even more for-hire vehicle and taxi drivers died.

“In our WhatsApp groups with members, almost every single post was about a driver who had died," said Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. "We were even getting phone calls from families overseas, you know, who couldn’t find their loved ones here.”

Many taxi drivers were devastated, already in crisis since medallion values went down due to the onslaught of Uber and Lyft. And with no aid beyond COVID unemployment, some decided to stop driving.

In April 2020, about 9,000 fewer taxis were on the road. Nearly 4,000 remain in storage. The MTA, meanwhile, lost $3.9 billion in 2020, with average weekday ridership dropping from about 5.5 million to around 500,000 by April 2020.

Now, subway ridership is regularly above 4 million per weekday. Buses have been a little slower to recover.

“It’s been key to supporting the city’s economic revival," MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber said. "We have more jobs even than we did before COVID, and one reason is that transit came back, came back strong."