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In 2015, METRO took its outdated bus network down to the studs and designed an entirely new regional transit system that made bus service less complicated and more frequent along the busiest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In 2015, METRO took its outdated bus network down to the studs and designed an entirely new regional transit system that made bus service less complicated and more frequent along the busiest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

[llamaorama]

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

Originally Posted by craigs

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.

My counter to this is that DART actually followed Houston's lead and underwent a similar reconstruction of its network. But this happened around the same time as COVID and is just starting to be complete. And DART ridership has gone up a lot in the last few years, it is above 80% of the pre-COVID decline which I believe is similar to the LA Metro system. The core part of the Light Rail (Red/Blue central corridor) I think is surpassed its previous declines, not sure.

Something that has transpired is that there is a push by suburban member cities to reduce the funding they send to DART. The same suburban member cities were the ones who demanded DART build the new Silver Line, which is going to add more costs to the budget but probably be just another 5,000 riders/day commuter project. So its' hard for DART to get where they want to be. It's not a matter of mismanagement at all but politics.

Also I can't claim to be an expert on this, but I can look at a map. All sunbelt cities are essentially archipelagos of tiny islands of urban density and employment destinations that benefit from and will actually utilize public transportation when it exists, surrounded by a vast sea of suburban sprawl where nobody would ever set foot on a bus.

In Houston, those "islands" have METRO service, like for example the corner of FM-1960 & I-45 in Spring where you have a bunch of enshittified dangerous 1970s apartment complexes full of people who can't afford a car and across the street is every retail and chain restaurant known to man which all employ a lot of low wage service industry workers, and all those people ride the bus. So because Metro runs a handful of local buses up there since it's inside Harris County, that's a few thousand extra riders for their statistics. Then you have similar pockets in Humble, in Alief, in the far south metro, etc.

In DFW, there's places which are exactly the same in Arlington and Bedford and Euless. The mayors in those cities are very conservative, because outside of those pockets those places are all huge 1980s era single family homes on large lots with mature trees that sell for like $500k. They don't want to contribute to transit and they don't want any buses running in the area.

To me its that simple. Metro has more routes and is a vastly bigger network than either DART or Trinity Metro even combined.

[bilbao58]

This conversation is kind of funny to me. The numbers in Texas are all crap. It wouldn't surprise me if the numbers for Dallas or Fort Worth separately are better than the numbers for Houston. Well, maybe for Dallas. I don't know about Fort Worth. D and FW may just be penalized in the numbers sweepstakes by being counted together as one large metropolitan entity when clearly the whole does not equal the sum of its parts.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

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.

This is probably true but then again density has been going up, and partly the car ownership is high because the transit sucks.

It depends on the city but I'd guess an area like central Halifax is squarely in the range where in most developed nations in the modern era there would be more than just bus service. And Halifax is an expensive place to own a car, has overall bad traffic, and has slow travel times. Some cities might be lower density and have better road networks, so in practice they do better from relying on cars more.

[nec209]

One of the things I hear from lot of people in Toronto is how hard it is to find parking in Toronto than the suburbs or how in Toronto it is more hard to get around driving in Toronto than the suburbs may be because of the narrow streets. And lot people say it is much easier taking subway and public transit. Than trying to drive in Toronto.

And it is even typical for people in the suburbs to drive to city border and park the car and take the subway because they say it is hard to find parking in Toronto or driving in Toronto is much harder and not easy like the suburbs.

This got me thinking because looking at the stats in Los Angles a lot more people drive in LA than Toronto and this got me thinking is this because of culture difference? Or is driving in Los Angles much easier than Toronto.

Is it easier to find parking in Los Angles than Toronto? Is it easier driving and getting around in vehicle in Los Angles than Toronto?

When you look at the stats people in Toronto have much more public transit ridership than LA.

Yet people say driving in Toronto it is hard to find parking in Toronto or the experience is terrible driving in Toronto and they like to take the subway as they find that easier. Yet in Los Angels people love to drive so what is the difference is this a culture difference or is it easier to find parking in LA than Toronto or driving around in LA is much easier than Toronto.