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"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

"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.