3 ms·
> So "lousy" NYC has almost double the number of wheelchair accessible stations as "great" Boston, and 8 times the total number of stations. That's comparing a
by nkoren 10y ago
> So "lousy" NYC has almost double the number of wheelchair accessible stations as "great" Boston, and 8 times the total number of stations.
That's comparing apples to watermelons.
Boston has a population of 650,000; New York, 8.5 million. So in Boston there is one accessible station per 13,500 residents. In New York, one per 92,400 residents. (The total residents per station is much more comparable, at 12.2k and 20k respectively).
This suggests that a more like-for-like basis, New York is roughly 4 to 7 times less accessible than Boston.
Edit: Actually, here's a better way to think about it, which does work a bit more in New York's favor. A variant of Metcalfe's law[1] applies to transport networks, in that the utility of a network is proportional to the total number of journeys that can be taken within it. So Boston has (48^2 - 48)/2 = 1,128 accessible origin/destination pairs, while NYC has 4,186 O/D pairs. So 1.73 accessible O/D pairs per thousand residents in Boston, versus 0.49 in New York.
For an able-bodied resident, Boston provides 2.12 trips per thousand residents, 10.6 trips per thousand residents for NYC. So if you're not in a wheelchair, then NYC is five times better than Boston. But if you are in a wheelchair, then NYC is 3.5 times worse.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
- rrdharan 10y agoIsn't the better population comparison the MSAs (metropolitan statistical areas)? For Boston that's ~5M and for NYC it's ~20M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Boston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Boston
- ufmace 10y agoThanks, that's an interesting calculation, and I didn't take population into account. The 650k to 8.5M sounds like a higher ratio than I'd expect though. If we take the MSA from rrdharan's post, NYC metro population is 4x greater rather than 13x with your numbers. If we use those numbers, then we'd get accessible pairs per thousand residents of 0.2093 for NYC, and 0.2256 for Boston, which makes Boston about 8% better. I'm not sure how valid that is though, since at least for the NYC area, that MSA population is for the tri-state area, which is served by a number of other rail lines, and the majority of which isn't directly accessible to the NYC MTA system that those numbers are for. I don't know as much about the Boston area, but seems like a fair guess that those 5M people mostly don't have direct access to the Boston city transit, and may or may not be served by various other transit systems. Can any Bostonians confirm or deny?
- ghc 10y agoA someone working with MBTA data I can chime in. The story is rather complicated. Boston's subway system serves a population of around 2 million, including administratively separate cities like Somerville, Cambridge, Brookline and Newton that are more like boroughs than separate cities. The rest is served by the commuter rail system and bus system, which do a good job of covering most people (probably about 4 million of 5 million). There's actually 145 subway stations (though that includes a few underground stations on the silver line, technically BRT for now), but the article didn't the green line (America's first subway, 1898), because it's a "light rail" subway, not a "heavy rail" subway. Those stations all got retrofitted with wheelchair access or else were already above ground stations with access. It's fair to say that those 145 stations serve about 1/4 the population of the MTA in New York.