> 1.8 billion rides per year for a 8-million city works out to less than 0.7 rides per day per capita. I can guarantee that Houston has more road trips. That's

> 1.8 billion rides per year for a 8-million city works out to less than 0.7 rides per day per capita. I can guarantee that Houston has more road trips. That's just the subway. Add another 100 million for MNRR and LIRR, plus another 100 million for PATH and NJT. And those are all post-COVID numbers; you can roughly double each to get an actual picture for the volume of mass transit needed to run NYC. > I'm using the data for the Greater Houston Area (pop: 7.2 million), which matches what people think when they say "Houston". The NYC Combined Statistical area has 23 million people in it[1]. Nearly as many people commute into just Manhattan as live in the actual city of Houston[2]. You simply do not get those numbers with road-based transit. It doesn't matter how you cut this: Houston is operating at a fractional scale, and will continue to do so as long as roads dominate its development patterns. Houston's government appears to be aware of this[3]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area [2]: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/dynamic_pop_manhattan.pdf https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/dynamic_pop_manhatt... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail