6 ms·

Ok so it’s like... third in the country with those qualifiers.

TulliusCicero 7y ago
Wrong! It's...fifth, actually: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_transit_ridership https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_hig... > 1. New York City, New York – 56.5% > 2. Jersey City, New Jersey – 47.6% > 3. Washington, D.C. – 37.4% > 4. Boston, Massachusetts – 33.7% > 5. San Francisco, California – 33.1% As I noted in another comment, SF's numbers are pumped up a bit by its unusually small population size relative to its metro population size. But yeah it's still one of the top cities in the country for public transit, sad as it is.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  Huh. Visiting San Francisco from Dublin (a city with a notably _bad_ system by European standards, with 53% ridership by this metric) it would never have occurred to me it was even in the top ten. Not a great system at all.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    Well, driving in SF is also pretty painful, honestly. That definitely impacts things. I think SF still has more rail than Dublin though, right? When I visited Dublin seemed like it had almost nothing, even less than SF.
    - Rebelgecko 7y ago
      I think the DART and Luas trains are roughly equivalent to BART. However when I was in Dublin as a tourist I was impressed with how thorough their bus network was. Part of it was that there were lots of lines and stops, but the buses were also fairly frequent. Getting rid of the "Oops, I missed my bus by 5 seconds so I have to wait 30 minutes for the next one" factor probably does a lot to increase ridership.
      - TulliusCicero 7y ago
        Coming from Munich, I was deeply disappointed by Dublin's buses. Munich's buses are actually fairly reliable, Dublin's bus timetables don't even qualify as suggestions. Often buses just wouldn't show up, period. We'd have to give up and find some other entirely different bus line going in the same general direction.
    - rsynnott 7y ago
      Yeah, Dublin has fairly minimal rail and tram systems, though I found SF's fairly unusable when I was there. SF's bus system seemed particularly bad, though. In many/most cases, if it was suggesting walking for 45 minutes, Google Maps couldn't do better with a public transport suggestion. This would rarely be the case in Dublin, though it does happen. It would almost never be the case in a city with actually good public transportation.
      - TulliusCicero 7y ago
        Oh I definitely wouldn't argue that SF's transit system is good. NYC's is borderline good, everything else in the US doesn't qualify for the word. I'd put my current city, Munich, at a similar level of good-ness to NYC, though it's more impressive, having a smaller population and all. If the S-Bahn didn't have so many problems in the winter, I'd not hesitate to call it good. There'd still be plenty of room for improvement, though.
      - inferiorhuman 7y ago
        In many/most cases, if it was suggesting walking for 45 minutes It who? A forty-five minute walk in San Francisco will take you nearly halfway across town (assuming you can walk a 15 minute mile). My break even time was closer to 20 minutes than 45 (if I didn't see a train coming I'd just walk 20 minutes to the subway). Muni has pretty high coverage standards that allow you to get pretty much within 1/8 mile of anywhere in the city during most hours of the day. The cost is that the density of stops makes it difficult to speed up service.
  - ska 7y ago
    A thing to note is that there are major metros in the US without anything resembling a functional system at all (hi, Houston).
- ghaff 7y ago
  That's an interesting set of data in that, as you suggested upthread, doesn't really correspond to other measures of mass transit "goodness" that are more along the lines of what people think of. Boston and SF are essentially tied--yet, the many faults of the MBTA especially in bad weather aside, it's got a pretty decent transit system. Indeed, one that isn't really that terrible relative to many European cities. And Chicago is lower, in spite of again having an even somewhat iconic transit system. And Jersey City I would never have guessed even though it's adjacent to NYC. I wonder to what degree that reflects income levels in a dense urban environment.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    That Chicago represents 28% of its metro population vs SF's 11% definitely hurts Chicago and helps SF here, if you normalized that I'm sure Chicago would come out on top (but SF would still be above average for the US, probably significantly above average). For Jersey City, these metrics are specifically measuring commutes to work, and obviously commuting via transit to NYC there for your job is extremely common; its numbers would undoubtedly be lower if you were measuring public transit in general (though this may be true for basically all cities, honestly, so I'm not sure if that would affect the rankings).
- gok 7y ago
  This is in fact an excellent demonstration of how utterly meaningless commute transit mode share of a city is as a proxy for the quality of a transit system.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    "How much people use public transit is meaningless when judging how useful that transit is" is certainly a hot take if I've ever seen one. If you can think of a better single metric, by all means, let loose. I know this one's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than "miles of light rail" or anything else I've come up with before. Something like the Paris mayor's 15-minute city -- a metric that encapsulated how reachable basic errand points are by public transit in a limited amount of time -- could be better, but would probably be fairly challenging to calculate. I'm quite confident that SF would still do pretty well using that metric, though, at least by US standards.
    - gok 7y ago
      Better metrics would include: - Looking at MSAs or CSAs rather than cities proper, since cities like SF are tiny and you get a distorted view by ignoring people that work or live outside the city - Including non-commute usage data. A good transit system has people who use it even for leisure. - Equitably. Systems disproportionately used by rich or poor people are bad. - Development patterns. If real estate is cheaper near transit, that suggests the system is bad. If you pay more to be near transit, that suggests the system is valuable. - Addressable market. A sprawling metropolitan area with lots of freeways is basically never going to have a high mass transit mode share, but a system can still be ok for the people that do use it. A simpler and better metric here would just be ridership per capita per CSA, although even that misses a lot of important points.

Wrong! It's...fifth, actually: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_transit_ridership https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_hig... > 1. New York City, New York – 56.5% > 2. Jersey City, New Jersey – 47.6% > 3. Washington, D.C. – 37.4% > 4. Boston, Massachusetts – 33.7% > 5. San Francisco, California – 33.1% As I noted in another comment, SF's numbers are pumped up a bit by its unusually small population size relative to its metro population size. But yeah it's still one of the top cities in the country for public transit, sad as it is.

rsynnott 7y ago
Huh. Visiting San Francisco from Dublin (a city with a notably _bad_ system by European standards, with 53% ridership by this metric) it would never have occurred to me it was even in the top ten. Not a great system at all.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  Well, driving in SF is also pretty painful, honestly. That definitely impacts things. I think SF still has more rail than Dublin though, right? When I visited Dublin seemed like it had almost nothing, even less than SF.
  - Rebelgecko 7y ago
    I think the DART and Luas trains are roughly equivalent to BART. However when I was in Dublin as a tourist I was impressed with how thorough their bus network was. Part of it was that there were lots of lines and stops, but the buses were also fairly frequent. Getting rid of the "Oops, I missed my bus by 5 seconds so I have to wait 30 minutes for the next one" factor probably does a lot to increase ridership.
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      Coming from Munich, I was deeply disappointed by Dublin's buses. Munich's buses are actually fairly reliable, Dublin's bus timetables don't even qualify as suggestions. Often buses just wouldn't show up, period. We'd have to give up and find some other entirely different bus line going in the same general direction.
  - rsynnott 7y ago
    Yeah, Dublin has fairly minimal rail and tram systems, though I found SF's fairly unusable when I was there. SF's bus system seemed particularly bad, though. In many/most cases, if it was suggesting walking for 45 minutes, Google Maps couldn't do better with a public transport suggestion. This would rarely be the case in Dublin, though it does happen. It would almost never be the case in a city with actually good public transportation.
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      Oh I definitely wouldn't argue that SF's transit system is good. NYC's is borderline good, everything else in the US doesn't qualify for the word. I'd put my current city, Munich, at a similar level of good-ness to NYC, though it's more impressive, having a smaller population and all. If the S-Bahn didn't have so many problems in the winter, I'd not hesitate to call it good. There'd still be plenty of room for improvement, though.
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      In many/most cases, if it was suggesting walking for 45 minutes It who? A forty-five minute walk in San Francisco will take you nearly halfway across town (assuming you can walk a 15 minute mile). My break even time was closer to 20 minutes than 45 (if I didn't see a train coming I'd just walk 20 minutes to the subway). Muni has pretty high coverage standards that allow you to get pretty much within 1/8 mile of anywhere in the city during most hours of the day. The cost is that the density of stops makes it difficult to speed up service.
- ska 7y ago
  A thing to note is that there are major metros in the US without anything resembling a functional system at all (hi, Houston).
ghaff 7y ago
That's an interesting set of data in that, as you suggested upthread, doesn't really correspond to other measures of mass transit "goodness" that are more along the lines of what people think of. Boston and SF are essentially tied--yet, the many faults of the MBTA especially in bad weather aside, it's got a pretty decent transit system. Indeed, one that isn't really that terrible relative to many European cities. And Chicago is lower, in spite of again having an even somewhat iconic transit system. And Jersey City I would never have guessed even though it's adjacent to NYC. I wonder to what degree that reflects income levels in a dense urban environment.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  That Chicago represents 28% of its metro population vs SF's 11% definitely hurts Chicago and helps SF here, if you normalized that I'm sure Chicago would come out on top (but SF would still be above average for the US, probably significantly above average). For Jersey City, these metrics are specifically measuring commutes to work, and obviously commuting via transit to NYC there for your job is extremely common; its numbers would undoubtedly be lower if you were measuring public transit in general (though this may be true for basically all cities, honestly, so I'm not sure if that would affect the rankings).
gok 7y ago
This is in fact an excellent demonstration of how utterly meaningless commute transit mode share of a city is as a proxy for the quality of a transit system.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  "How much people use public transit is meaningless when judging how useful that transit is" is certainly a hot take if I've ever seen one. If you can think of a better single metric, by all means, let loose. I know this one's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than "miles of light rail" or anything else I've come up with before. Something like the Paris mayor's 15-minute city -- a metric that encapsulated how reachable basic errand points are by public transit in a limited amount of time -- could be better, but would probably be fairly challenging to calculate. I'm quite confident that SF would still do pretty well using that metric, though, at least by US standards.
  - gok 7y ago
    Better metrics would include: - Looking at MSAs or CSAs rather than cities proper, since cities like SF are tiny and you get a distorted view by ignoring people that work or live outside the city - Including non-commute usage data. A good transit system has people who use it even for leisure. - Equitably. Systems disproportionately used by rich or poor people are bad. - Development patterns. If real estate is cheaper near transit, that suggests the system is bad. If you pay more to be near transit, that suggests the system is valuable. - Addressable market. A sprawling metropolitan area with lots of freeways is basically never going to have a high mass transit mode share, but a system can still be ok for the people that do use it. A simpler and better metric here would just be ridership per capita per CSA, although even that misses a lot of important points.