7 ms·

How U.S. Cities’ Public Transit Stacks up

76 points by jgunaratne 12y ago

droopyEyelids 12y ago
Seemed like he stopped at a visualization of the data, without any real interpretation. I'd like to see some information on the density of the areas. For example, Chicago is listed as the metro region (8 million people) when the city itself only has about 3 million, and public transport hardly exists outside the city. If the total rides had been divided by the city population, it would equal much closer to 200 rides per capita.
- mdkras 12y ago
  Good point - I found this a confusing analysis without digging much into what it was saying - Urbana and Athens were high on the list...why? Do they have public bus systems that students use extensively? If so, that would tend to give a false impression of how much public transit is used there. I liked that he later pulled apart the small and large cities, but it would have been nice to understand what the data was saying in the context of the cities it examined. Your point on Chicago is well taken - I was surprised to see SF/Oak ahead of it, as they "feel" harder to navigate with transit only, but I was forgetting that the suburbs are included in Chicago, which is basically impossible once you leave the city limits.
  - namocat 12y ago
    Yeah, I was very surprised to see Athens, GA in the top 5. I was not even aware that they had a substantial public transit system and I lived in GA for ~15 years.
    - kasey_junk 12y ago
      You are probably mentally discounting bus infrastructure. Busses are much more prevalent than people think but their demographic skews much lower on the economic scale than other transit options (often because they are abysmally slow).
  - erjiang 12y ago
    Yes, college towns often have great public transit usage because students ride for free, the school pays the local agency or runs their own vehicles, and you have a lot of young people without cars. Ann Arbor, MI (#20) is a great example where University of Michigan runs a fleet of buses that puts many small cities' systems to shame. Lafayette, IN (#30) is partially supported by serving Purdue University. Bloomington, IN (#40) has two bus systems - the city's, and Indiana University's. (Disclaimer: these are all customers of DoubleMap.) Not sure why you think it would be a false impression - public transit is used a lot in college towns.
    - adestefan 12y ago
      State College, PA is where Penn State University is located. Even if you drive to the university as a student you still need to take a bus to get to class. That makes around 45,000 students using public transportation everyday.
- Fishkins 12y ago
  In general, I do wish more people would explicitly say whether they're listing city population or metro population. In this case the numbers are all clearly metro area. It would be interesting to see how the rankings differed for just the cities. I imagine they'd be very similar, but a few cities would move around.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    In many cases I think you'd want a third number, something like the core urbanized area. Metro area is too big, but in some cases city limits are either too big or too small for historical/political reasons. For example Houston includes many of its suburbs, because Texas law is very annexation-friendly. Whereas parts of the urban core of Boston are legally in Brookline and Cambridge, and part of the legal core of Copenhagen is legally in Frederiksberg, but for transit purposes those distinctions aren't that important (Brookline/Cambridge are still part of the "T", and Frederiksberg has a line of the Copenhagen Metro).
- secabeen 12y ago
  Well, it's not clear if the ride count includes metra. If it does, then you need to include the entire metro area. If it's CTA only, then it should be just the city.
  - kasey_junk 12y ago
    CTA does actually service parts of the metro area outside of the city such as Evanston & Oak Park.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  Public transportation outside the city of Chicago (PACE + METRA + northern and western L extensions) is part of a unified system with Chicago, and is huge, heavily used, and critical (as opposed to hardly existing.)
  - superuser2 12y ago
    However, most people out there own cars. Metra is very infrequent outside of commuting hours, and seems to be mostly used as a way for car owners who live in the suburbs to avoid freeway congestion and parking costs downtown, rather than a complete car replacement. In urban neighborhoods on the red and blue lines, for example, car ownership is basically superfluous.
greggman 12y ago
What I don't like about this chart it it doesn't show how bad the USA's public transportation is relative to places like say Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Berlin, Helsinki, etc. They're night and day better than NYC which itself is night and day better than SF.
- taurath 12y ago
  Exactly, if we're "stacking up" why not against international cities?
  - tzs 12y ago
    Other countries have legal, political, cultural, and social environments that differ significantly from the US. Finding out that something works better in London or Paris than it does in Seattle is interesting as trivia, but because of those environment difference usually doesn't tell much about how to improve that thing in Seattle. Finding out that San Francisco does something better than Seattle does teach something about improving it in Seattle, because the legal, political, cultural, and social environments are much more similar. Hence, domestic comparisons are more interesting, as they suggest more achievable improvements.
    - reillyse 12y ago
      However comparing internationally shows how far behind the US is on this front, and how much they need to improve. No point giving pats on the back all round when nobody is even attempting to change the "legal, cultural and social" environment.
    - tormeh 12y ago
      Indeed, no knowledge can be gained from the outside world. Those parts of the world run on magic and stinky cheese.
    - pessimizer 12y ago
      >Other countries have legal, political, cultural, and social environments that differ significantly The same is true within the US. It is neither legally, politically, culturally, nor socially homogenous. Learning how to improve public transportation in Seattle would be more productive if you studied Amsterdam than if you studied Memphis or Baton Rouge.
jonny_eh 12y ago
The only thing I learned from the article is that NY has a really popular subway. Duh. My question is: Why is SF's public transit so popular? It can't be because of the quality. LA is a much bigger city, why isn't public transit more popular there?
- ido 12y ago
  Maybe because SF is denser?
  - mturmon 12y ago
    Yes, and part of that is the area used. The SF-Oakland area used for aggregation contains 3.3M people. The LA area contains 12.3M.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- abalone 12y ago
  Geography's a factor. It's not just SF, it's Oakland too, and there's a ton of commuting between them on BART on a daily basis due to the cost of living difference. They're separated by water so with BART (an underwater subway) you avoid bridge traffic. Also parking in SF and real estate in general is at a premium due to it being on the head of a peninsula. SF alone might rank lower. Muni is certainly not "popular" with the population.. it's much less reliable than BART. My terribly anecdotal impression is a lot of people bike or take cabs within SF if at all possible.
- wiseleo 12y ago
  San Francisco numbers are misleading. They likely counted both BART and Caltrain. Since Oakland is included, Amtrak trains (Capitol Corridor, ACE, San Joaquin) might also be included. All the systems I mentioned are heavy rail and carry hundreds of thousands of passengers daily. Muni has an always packed light rail subway system as well. Unfortunately, unlike San Jose's VTA, that subway has no bike carrying capacity. This makes it difficult to ride the bike to a light rail station and then use it again to reach your final destination in downtown or elsewhere in the city. Regional heavy rail systems like BART have enormous ridership. San Francisco buses need dedicated lanes in residential areas. Based on my personal experience, the root cause of traffic slowdowns appears to be double-parked cars. Buses run quickly at night when they are not slowed down by cars. http://sf.streetsblog.org/2013/10/02/the-sorry-state-of-double-parking-enforcement-on-sf-streets/ http://sf.streetsblog.org/2013/10/02/the-sorry-state-of-doub... But this is changing. Dedicated lanes are being put in place. http://sf.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Picture-2.jpg http://sf.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Picture...
rotten 12y ago
We had public transportation in Central Ohio, and then the automotive industry lobbied hard to have it dismantled. Ohio, Michigan, and the rest of the midwest were home to the automotive industry. Now decades later, with the automotive lobby not being quite so strong, the asphalt industry has their guy as the head of the transportation department. Non highway projects of any sort are not just discouraged but actively squashed and ostracized. I'm still astounded they are actually building the new US Bike Route 50 through Central Ohio. It must be forces outside our state government making that happen. Maybe it is a good contract for the asphalt contractors too. I would not be surprised, in spite of that, if our governor's administration figures out a way to stop it. I have heard many, many times around here: "This is America. I have a RIGHT to drive the biggest car I can afford and I expect to be able to do so whenever and wherever I want. You are not going to force me to ride a bus or subway or train or bike, nor force any of my tax dollars to go to such un-American things." (Apparently if you have any sort of public transportation system you are forcing people to use it.)
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  You convince car people to support transit with arguments like: Adding another lane to the freeway encourages people to take more cars. It actually doesn't reduce congestion on the freeway much; the primary effect of adding lanes to the freeway is to increase congestion on secondary roads. The best way to reduce congestion so that you can drive to work faster is transit. Every person riding a bus is somebody not driving a car, clogging up your lane.
- netcan 12y ago
  The motion that cars are a private, free market form of transport while trains are public, left wing sort of transportation is interesting. Roads are publicly funded and owned just like tracks are. The cars themselves are privately owned, so I guess that's market points for cars. But, trains involve a direct transaction that (partially) funds the facility in a user-pays way. Roads are funded by taxes. They try to use registration and petrol taxes that are related to use of roads but it's still a tax, not a normal transaction. If you drive on a private road, you still pay petrol tax and the taxes can't be tied to use of a specific road. I'd say that's market points to the trains. Getting to the more fuzzy trains have a social egality to them. Everyone sits in the same cars looking at each other, sharing space. You end up squished against people of races, creeds & classes that you mightn't associate with normally. They're seen as environmental which is left wing. They're inclusive of the marginal people who can't afford to drive, are to young or otherwise unable. Cars have a personal liberty aspect to them. Your car. Your space. Your rules. Go where you want, when you want. Open roads. Wind in your hair. They don't have a schedule set by someplace else or stops decided on by some comitee. Cars are status symbols and and opportunity to show wealth. Car ownership is something to aspire to. They're symbols of the great capitalist/industrial age. I have interesting associations with the late 19th & early 20th centuries, the formative years of trains and cars. I associate the industry of the late 19th more with socialist symbols. The plight of the working man, Marxism (pre-Lenin and the east-west associations), early labour movements, decaying empires. Coal soot. Europe. I associate the early 20th industry with American ascension. Iconic technicolour images of manufacturing wealth pampering American housewives with vacuum cleaners and weekly trips to a beauty parlors. All the values of that time and place. A certain type of clean shaven naivety. I can't quite put a thorough argument together, but I think the symbolism is interesting.
desireco42 12y ago
I am surprised that Chicago is not stacked higher. I was under impression we here have one of the better transit systems, compared to others in the US.
- mdkras 12y ago
  it's quite good within the city limits, but it drops off very quickly when the suburbs are included. These numbers included the suburbs.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    That being the case, you'd assume that SFBA would plummet down the list, since public transportation on the peninsula is atrocious.
jstalin 12y ago
There is a lot more interesting data in the NTD that I wish someone with more programming skills than me could put together in a graphical way. For instance, you can calculate the amount of CO2 emitted per passenger and per passenger mile. You can calculate the subsidy per rider and per passenger mile. You can even determine the average utilization of the system by checking the average number of riders on each bus. From doing some of that work manually, I found that many (if not most) public transit systems are emitting more CO2 than if all of the passengers had ridden in a car, with the national average of 1.7 riders per car.
coldcode 12y ago
I live in the 50th largest city in the US and we have zero public transportation. Yet we are the sports and entertainment center of the DFW metroplex including the Dallas Cowboys spaceship stadium.
ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
If you remove buses from the equation, I believe the US transit system would like considerably worse.
dajohnson89 12y ago
DC's subway system is awesome, for a city of its size.

76 points by jgunaratne 12y ago

Seemed like he stopped at a visualization of the data, without any real interpretation. I'd like to see some information on the density of the areas. For example, Chicago is listed as the metro region (8 million people) when the city itself only has about 3 million, and public transport hardly exists outside the city. If the total rides had been divided by the city population, it would equal much closer to 200 rides per capita.

mdkras 12y ago
Good point - I found this a confusing analysis without digging much into what it was saying - Urbana and Athens were high on the list...why? Do they have public bus systems that students use extensively? If so, that would tend to give a false impression of how much public transit is used there. I liked that he later pulled apart the small and large cities, but it would have been nice to understand what the data was saying in the context of the cities it examined. Your point on Chicago is well taken - I was surprised to see SF/Oak ahead of it, as they "feel" harder to navigate with transit only, but I was forgetting that the suburbs are included in Chicago, which is basically impossible once you leave the city limits.
- namocat 12y ago
  Yeah, I was very surprised to see Athens, GA in the top 5. I was not even aware that they had a substantial public transit system and I lived in GA for ~15 years.
  - kasey_junk 12y ago
    You are probably mentally discounting bus infrastructure. Busses are much more prevalent than people think but their demographic skews much lower on the economic scale than other transit options (often because they are abysmally slow).
- erjiang 12y ago
  Yes, college towns often have great public transit usage because students ride for free, the school pays the local agency or runs their own vehicles, and you have a lot of young people without cars. Ann Arbor, MI (#20) is a great example where University of Michigan runs a fleet of buses that puts many small cities' systems to shame. Lafayette, IN (#30) is partially supported by serving Purdue University. Bloomington, IN (#40) has two bus systems - the city's, and Indiana University's. (Disclaimer: these are all customers of DoubleMap.) Not sure why you think it would be a false impression - public transit is used a lot in college towns.
  - adestefan 12y ago
    State College, PA is where Penn State University is located. Even if you drive to the university as a student you still need to take a bus to get to class. That makes around 45,000 students using public transportation everyday.
Fishkins 12y ago
In general, I do wish more people would explicitly say whether they're listing city population or metro population. In this case the numbers are all clearly metro area. It would be interesting to see how the rankings differed for just the cities. I imagine they'd be very similar, but a few cities would move around.
- _delirium 12y ago
  In many cases I think you'd want a third number, something like the core urbanized area. Metro area is too big, but in some cases city limits are either too big or too small for historical/political reasons. For example Houston includes many of its suburbs, because Texas law is very annexation-friendly. Whereas parts of the urban core of Boston are legally in Brookline and Cambridge, and part of the legal core of Copenhagen is legally in Frederiksberg, but for transit purposes those distinctions aren't that important (Brookline/Cambridge are still part of the "T", and Frederiksberg has a line of the Copenhagen Metro).
secabeen 12y ago
Well, it's not clear if the ride count includes metra. If it does, then you need to include the entire metro area. If it's CTA only, then it should be just the city.
- kasey_junk 12y ago
  CTA does actually service parts of the metro area outside of the city such as Evanston & Oak Park.
pessimizer 12y ago
Public transportation outside the city of Chicago (PACE + METRA + northern and western L extensions) is part of a unified system with Chicago, and is huge, heavily used, and critical (as opposed to hardly existing.)
- superuser2 12y ago
  However, most people out there own cars. Metra is very infrequent outside of commuting hours, and seems to be mostly used as a way for car owners who live in the suburbs to avoid freeway congestion and parking costs downtown, rather than a complete car replacement. In urban neighborhoods on the red and blue lines, for example, car ownership is basically superfluous.

greggman 12y ago

What I don't like about this chart it it doesn't show how bad the USA's public transportation is relative to places like say Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Berlin, Helsinki, etc. They're night and day better than NYC which itself is night and day better than SF.

taurath 12y ago
Exactly, if we're "stacking up" why not against international cities?
- tzs 12y ago
  Other countries have legal, political, cultural, and social environments that differ significantly from the US. Finding out that something works better in London or Paris than it does in Seattle is interesting as trivia, but because of those environment difference usually doesn't tell much about how to improve that thing in Seattle. Finding out that San Francisco does something better than Seattle does teach something about improving it in Seattle, because the legal, political, cultural, and social environments are much more similar. Hence, domestic comparisons are more interesting, as they suggest more achievable improvements.
  - reillyse 12y ago
    However comparing internationally shows how far behind the US is on this front, and how much they need to improve. No point giving pats on the back all round when nobody is even attempting to change the "legal, cultural and social" environment.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Indeed, no knowledge can be gained from the outside world. Those parts of the world run on magic and stinky cheese.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    >Other countries have legal, political, cultural, and social environments that differ significantly The same is true within the US. It is neither legally, politically, culturally, nor socially homogenous. Learning how to improve public transportation in Seattle would be more productive if you studied Amsterdam than if you studied Memphis or Baton Rouge.

jonny_eh 12y ago

The only thing I learned from the article is that NY has a really popular subway. Duh. My question is: Why is SF's public transit so popular? It can't be because of the quality. LA is a much bigger city, why isn't public transit more popular there?

ido 12y ago
Maybe because SF is denser?
- mturmon 12y ago
  Yes, and part of that is the area used. The SF-Oakland area used for aggregation contains 3.3M people. The LA area contains 12.3M.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
abalone 12y ago
Geography's a factor. It's not just SF, it's Oakland too, and there's a ton of commuting between them on BART on a daily basis due to the cost of living difference. They're separated by water so with BART (an underwater subway) you avoid bridge traffic. Also parking in SF and real estate in general is at a premium due to it being on the head of a peninsula. SF alone might rank lower. Muni is certainly not "popular" with the population.. it's much less reliable than BART. My terribly anecdotal impression is a lot of people bike or take cabs within SF if at all possible.
wiseleo 12y ago
San Francisco numbers are misleading. They likely counted both BART and Caltrain. Since Oakland is included, Amtrak trains (Capitol Corridor, ACE, San Joaquin) might also be included. All the systems I mentioned are heavy rail and carry hundreds of thousands of passengers daily. Muni has an always packed light rail subway system as well. Unfortunately, unlike San Jose's VTA, that subway has no bike carrying capacity. This makes it difficult to ride the bike to a light rail station and then use it again to reach your final destination in downtown or elsewhere in the city. Regional heavy rail systems like BART have enormous ridership. San Francisco buses need dedicated lanes in residential areas. Based on my personal experience, the root cause of traffic slowdowns appears to be double-parked cars. Buses run quickly at night when they are not slowed down by cars. http://sf.streetsblog.org/2013/10/02/the-sorry-state-of-double-parking-enforcement-on-sf-streets/ http://sf.streetsblog.org/2013/10/02/the-sorry-state-of-doub... But this is changing. Dedicated lanes are being put in place. http://sf.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Picture-2.jpg http://sf.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Picture...

rotten 12y ago

We had public transportation in Central Ohio, and then the automotive industry lobbied hard to have it dismantled. Ohio, Michigan, and the rest of the midwest were home to the automotive industry. Now decades later, with the automotive lobby not being quite so strong, the asphalt industry has their guy as the head of the transportation department. Non highway projects of any sort are not just discouraged but actively squashed and ostracized. I'm still astounded they are actually building the new US Bike Route 50 through Central Ohio. It must be forces outside our state government making that happen. Maybe it is a good contract for the asphalt contractors too. I would not be surprised, in spite of that, if our governor's administration figures out a way to stop it. I have heard many, many times around here: "This is America. I have a RIGHT to drive the biggest car I can afford and I expect to be able to do so whenever and wherever I want. You are not going to force me to ride a bus or subway or train or bike, nor force any of my tax dollars to go to such un-American things." (Apparently if you have any sort of public transportation system you are forcing people to use it.)

bryanlarsen 12y ago
You convince car people to support transit with arguments like: Adding another lane to the freeway encourages people to take more cars. It actually doesn't reduce congestion on the freeway much; the primary effect of adding lanes to the freeway is to increase congestion on secondary roads. The best way to reduce congestion so that you can drive to work faster is transit. Every person riding a bus is somebody not driving a car, clogging up your lane.
netcan 12y ago
The motion that cars are a private, free market form of transport while trains are public, left wing sort of transportation is interesting. Roads are publicly funded and owned just like tracks are. The cars themselves are privately owned, so I guess that's market points for cars. But, trains involve a direct transaction that (partially) funds the facility in a user-pays way. Roads are funded by taxes. They try to use registration and petrol taxes that are related to use of roads but it's still a tax, not a normal transaction. If you drive on a private road, you still pay petrol tax and the taxes can't be tied to use of a specific road. I'd say that's market points to the trains. Getting to the more fuzzy trains have a social egality to them. Everyone sits in the same cars looking at each other, sharing space. You end up squished against people of races, creeds & classes that you mightn't associate with normally. They're seen as environmental which is left wing. They're inclusive of the marginal people who can't afford to drive, are to young or otherwise unable. Cars have a personal liberty aspect to them. Your car. Your space. Your rules. Go where you want, when you want. Open roads. Wind in your hair. They don't have a schedule set by someplace else or stops decided on by some comitee. Cars are status symbols and and opportunity to show wealth. Car ownership is something to aspire to. They're symbols of the great capitalist/industrial age. I have interesting associations with the late 19th & early 20th centuries, the formative years of trains and cars. I associate the industry of the late 19th more with socialist symbols. The plight of the working man, Marxism (pre-Lenin and the east-west associations), early labour movements, decaying empires. Coal soot. Europe. I associate the early 20th industry with American ascension. Iconic technicolour images of manufacturing wealth pampering American housewives with vacuum cleaners and weekly trips to a beauty parlors. All the values of that time and place. A certain type of clean shaven naivety. I can't quite put a thorough argument together, but I think the symbolism is interesting.

desireco42 12y ago

I am surprised that Chicago is not stacked higher. I was under impression we here have one of the better transit systems, compared to others in the US.

mdkras 12y ago
it's quite good within the city limits, but it drops off very quickly when the suburbs are included. These numbers included the suburbs.
- tptacek 12y ago
  That being the case, you'd assume that SFBA would plummet down the list, since public transportation on the peninsula is atrocious.

jstalin 12y ago

There is a lot more interesting data in the NTD that I wish someone with more programming skills than me could put together in a graphical way. For instance, you can calculate the amount of CO2 emitted per passenger and per passenger mile. You can calculate the subsidy per rider and per passenger mile. You can even determine the average utilization of the system by checking the average number of riders on each bus. From doing some of that work manually, I found that many (if not most) public transit systems are emitting more CO2 than if all of the passengers had ridden in a car, with the national average of 1.7 riders per car.

coldcode 12y ago

I live in the 50th largest city in the US and we have zero public transportation. Yet we are the sports and entertainment center of the DFW metroplex including the Dallas Cowboys spaceship stadium.

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago

If you remove buses from the equation, I believe the US transit system would like considerably worse.

dajohnson89 12y ago

DC's subway system is awesome, for a city of its size.