

How U.S. Cities’ Public Transit Stacks up - jgunaratne
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-your-citys-public-transit-stacks-up/

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greggman
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.

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taurath
Exactly, if we're "stacking up" why not against international cities?

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tzs
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.

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tormeh
Indeed, no knowledge can be gained from the outside world. Those parts of the
world run on magic and stinky cheese.

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rotten
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.)

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netcan
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.

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twoodfin
_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._

Most U.S. public mass transit could not maintain itself based on "user pays",
even forgetting about capital expenditures. Unsubsidized, fares would rise,
ridership would fall, and prices would then need to be still higher to
compensate.

On the other hand, the gas tax and other user fees (trucking, etc.) already
fund the majority of U.S. highway spending both maintenance and capital (even
with 1/6 of it redirected to mass transit!), and could easily fund all of it
if the political will were there. Some people would drive less if we charged
2x the gas tax or had an odometer tax, but nobody thinks the system itself
would be unsustainable in the same way that most public transit would be if it
had to be funded entirely by its users.

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smutticus
"Nationwide in 2011, highway user fees and user taxes made up just 50.4
percent of state and local expenses on roads. State and local governments
spent $153.0 billion on highway, road, and street expenses but raised only
$77.1 billion in user fees and user taxes ($12.7 billion in tolls and user
fees, $41.2 billion in fuel taxes, and $23.2 billion in vehicle license
taxes).[3] The rest was funded by $30 billion in general state and local
revenues and $46 billion in federal aid (approximately $28 billion derived
from the federal gasoline tax and $18 billion from general federal revenues or
deficit financed)."

That a direct quote from here: [http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-
taxes-and-user-fee...](http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-taxes-and-
user-fees-pay-only-half-state-local-road-spending)

Which cites its source as the, "U.S. Census Bureau, State and Local Government
Finance 2011."

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twoodfin
I was careful to say "highway system", by which I meant the IHS. Yes, local
governments fund local roads out of property and other local taxes, but a)
Everyone depends on their own local roads, even if they never drive, walk or
bike on them, not so mass transit b) Local gas taxes are hard to make work
because it's possible and tempting for gas stations to locate in the lowest
taxed locality.

Even so, your own link says 50% of state and local roads are funded with user
fees. The IHS number is around 70%, even with 1/6 of the gas tax redirected to
public transit. If you doubled the user fees and eliminated all other sources
of funding, the IHS and the state/local road system would still thrive. Not so
most public transit.

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jstalin
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.

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coldcode
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.

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desireco42
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.

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mdkras
it's quite good within the city limits, but it drops off very quickly when the
suburbs are included. These numbers included the suburbs.

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tptacek
That being the case, you'd assume that SFBA would plummet down the list, since
public transportation on the peninsula is atrocious.

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

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droopyEyelids
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
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.

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erjiang
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.

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adestefan
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.

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dajohnson89
DC's subway system is awesome, for a city of its size.

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jonny_eh
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?

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ido
Maybe because SF is denser?

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mturmon
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.

