3 ms·

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.