What cities in North America have highest public transit ridership?

[bilbao58]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

I think DFW has lower ridership numbers than Houston because a lot of the metro area is not in the service area of a transit agency, either DART or Trinity Metro. In contrast METRO in Houston is all of Harris County.

I'm also interested in the fact that Houston is higher than both San Antonio and Austin. Living in San Antonio, I'm frankly shocked SA is higher than anything.

[llamaorama]

I think Houston has two items that would correlate with transit use:

1. There is a very high density of extremely poor people in old 1960s apartment complexes in southwest Houston and the major streets like bissonet and belliare have those accordion buses running all the time full of people. Dallas has this too but some of it’s not in areas dart serves. Austin and San Antonio flatly do not have any comparable neighborhoods like that.

2. Texas Medical Center is sort of like a second downtown which is immune to remote work trends. And it’s intensely served by transit and rail and parking there is a mess. In all the other Texas cities, these facilities are more spread out.

[bilbao58]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

I think Houston has two items that would correlate with transit use:

1. There is a very high density of extremely poor people in old 1960s apartment complexes in southwest Houston and the major streets like bissonet and belliare have those accordion buses running all the time full of people. Dallas has this too but some of it’s not in areas dart serves. Austin and San Antonio flatly do not have any comparable neighborhoods like that.

2. Texas Medical Center is sort of like a second downtown which is immune to remote work trends. And it’s intensely served by transit and rail and parking there is a mess. In all the other Texas cities, these facilities are more spread out.

Or maybe Houston just has a better bus system:

In 2015, METRO took its outdated bus network down to the studs and designed an entirely new regional transit system that made bus service less complicated and more frequent along the busiest routes. The results made transportation officials in cities across the country take notice.


https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/ho...it-trendsetter

[craigs]

Originally Posted by bilbao58

Or maybe Houston just has a better bus system:

In 2015, METRO took its outdated bus network down to the studs and designed an entirely new regional transit system that made bus service less complicated and more frequent along the busiest routes. The results made transportation officials in cities across the country take notice.


https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/ho...it-trendsetter

I was just going to post this same point. Houston's transit agency let professional transit planners like Jarrett Walker come in, study, and then rebuild its transit network essentially from scratch. That was a really smart move.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by isaidso

In Canada, rail had long been viewed as something only big cities built. Thankfully, that mindset is changing with mid-sized cities building systems. KW has LRT, Hamilton and Mississauga will soon. London, Winnipeg, Quebec City, Halifax, Oshawa, Windsor, and Victoria will face increasing public pressure to do the same. It's quickly becoming an urban status symbol that the population covets.

Part of what's going on is that there are more large and medium sized Canadian cities now. Toronto was not much larger than Hamilton is today when the subway began construction in 1949. Planning for Edmonton's LRT began when it was about the same size Saskatoon is today.

It's a little depressing to think that Canada might have been more proactive at building this kind of infrastructure 50 years ago. In theory we are much wealthier today with better technology and more capacity to build, we've seen a shift to denser development, and there should be better economies of scale than when Canada had 1/4 the urbanization. The size at which cities get LRT or subways should be going down.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by someone123

Part of what's going on is that there are more large and medium sized Canadian cities now. Toronto was not much larger than Hamilton is today when the subway began construction in 1949. Planning for Edmonton's LRT began when it was about the same size Saskatoon is today.

It's a little depressing to think that Canada might have been more proactive at building this kind of infrastructure 50 years ago. In theory we are much wealthier today with better technology and more capacity to build, we've seen a shift to denser development, and there should be better economies of scale than when Canada had 1/4 the urbanization. The size at which cities get LRT or subways should be going down.

For sure. I suspect it's mostly because there's much higher rates of car ownership and usage now. A city needs to be larger now to get the same amount of ridership since a smaller percentage of people are using the systems. It would be interesting to compare the number of actual and projected transit users needed then vs now.

[vetteking]

I would think Washington DC and Baltimore