Urbanized Areas ranked by transit ridership per capita

[holladay]

Go Portland!

[combusean]

Originally Posted by rsbear

Eat our hydro-powered, emissions-free light-rail exhaust!

I wish I could, but the salmon are dying off.

PS, I'm not knocking Portland--I haven't been there but from what I hear I might not want to leave--its ranking on this list is probably the biggest reason.

It's just that hydropower is not as perfect as it appears.

[/offtopic]

[rsbear]

Originally Posted by combusean

I wish I could, but the salmon are dying off.

PS, I'm not knocking Portland--I haven't been there but from what I hear I might not want to leave--its ranking on this list is probably the biggest reason.

It's just that hydropower is not as perfect as it appears.

[/offtopic]

Good grief, I was just being playful, sorry if I offended you.

[combusean]

Sorry, I'm just bitter--hydro has done a lot of damage here at home and nobody really talks about it.

[delts145]

Great to see Salt Lake City ranking so high on the list! With the Light Rail & Heavy Commuter Rail projects just opening, under construction or about to begin construction, I anticipate the Wasatch Front will move into the top five or six in the next five years.

[miketoronto]

Originally Posted by Gordo

If every place is using unlinked trips, inflation should be showing up across the board relatively equally. It only matters if some places are not using linked and some are using unlinked for a "ranking" such as this.

It does matter, because using unlinked trips make the transit use seem higher then it really is. For example if you were to used linked trips, Boston's number would be down in the 50-60 range I believe. Unlinked trips count transfers as another trip, when really it is not.

[emathias]

These numbers seem suspect to me.

The population figures obvious cover a different area than normal CMSAs because they're lower than 2000 census number for CMSAs, but I see no way to know what they actually are.

To try to see how things might change if using more standard numbers, I put in 2000 CMSA numbers to see how the numbers changed.

Using year 2000 CMSA population numbers, here's a new list (Urban area (2000 CMSA) Per-capita) - for CMSAs that combined cities, I combined transit ridership to generate the per-capita number.

1) New York-Newark NY-NJ-CT (21,199,865) 167.8
2) Honolulu (876,156) 81.8
3) Washington-Baltimore (7,608,070) 74.9
4) Chicago (9,157,540) 66.7
5) Boston (5,819,100) 66.5
6) San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose (7,039,362) 65.5
7) Philadelphia (6,188,463) 55.3
8) Portland-Vancouver (2,265,223) 47.5
9) Seattle (3,554,760) 47.4
10) Las Vegas (1,563,282) 43.3

Another way to parse the data is to calculate per-square-mile trips. Unlike my list above, which mixes data sources (leading to uncertain reliability in the numbers), per-square-mile doesn't require mixing any data, since that data's already on the existing spreadsheet. Here's the Top Ten for that - I put the area's overall population density ranking after, so you can see which ones out- or under-perform for their density (remember, these are region density numbers, not city center density).

1) New York-Newark (1,060,824) - 4
2) San Francisco-Oakland (797,349) - 2
3) Honolulu (465,555) - 6
4) Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana (419,898) - 1
5) Washington, DC (398,434) - 21
6) Chicago (287,682) - 13
7) Las Vegas (236,703) - 7
8) Portland (226,854) - 22
9) Boston (222,739) - 58
10) Philadelphia (189,980) - 31

Looking at the density rankings for Boston and Philly, I think it's pretty obvious that the agency assembling these data does a piss-poor job of defining boundaries, leading to numbers that aren't very comparable and shouldn't have been ranked in their present form.

[miketoronto]

emathias your stats look closer to the ones I have seen for linked per capita ridership stats for US cities.

Yours are much closer to the real use of transit in these areas.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

It does matter, because using unlinked trips make the transit use seem higher then it really is. For example if you were to used linked trips, Boston's number would be down in the 50-60 range I believe. Unlinked trips count transfers as another trip, when really it is not.

It's a difficult game to try to tell when someone is transferring on the way to only one destination and when someone is making one or more quick stops with a bigger final destination. You can't always tell. For your purposes, someone who takes a bus north, stops at the post office to drop off some letters, then gets on a second bus going west and gets off to buy a book and gets on a third bus continuing north to his grandmother's house is counted how? Each intermediate stop would be quick enough that it could look like a transfer for "one trip" for a guy visiting his grandmother when, in reality, it's three trips combined into one. There is no easy way to represent that, so unlinked trips really are the only fair way to measure ridership. If you try to assemble multiple trips into "one," then you're guessing about usage patterns and penalizing cities that have good enough transit to make multi-stop errand-running possible with their transit system. I suppose you could argue that counting unlinked trips penalizes areas that have more direct routes between places, but transit agencies don't design systems to game the numbers like that. In the end,
either system has some uncertainty, but using anything other than unlinked trips requires the assembler of data to make guesses about how people are using the system - and guessing isn't very reliable across systems and regions.

[Gordo]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

It does matter, because using unlinked trips make the transit use seem higher then it really is. For example if you were to used linked trips, Boston's number would be down in the 50-60 range I believe. Unlinked trips count transfers as another trip, when really it is not.

Right, but for just rankings I don't really see the difference. I'm not looking at number of trips, simply the rankings of the cities.

[miketoronto]

Originally Posted by emathias

It's a difficult game to try to tell when someone is transferring on the way to only one destination and when someone is making one or more quick stops with a bigger final destination. You can't always tell. For your purposes, someone who takes a bus north, stops at the post office to drop off some letters, then gets on a second bus going west and gets off to buy a book and gets on a third bus continuing north to his grandmother's house is counted how? Each intermediate stop would be quick enough that it could look like a transfer for "one trip" for a guy visiting his grandmother when, in reality, it's three trips combined into one. There is no easy way to represent that, so unlinked trips really are the only fair way to measure ridership. If you try to assemble multiple trips into "one," then you're guessing about usage patterns and penalizing cities that have good enough transit to make multi-stop errand-running possible with their transit system. I suppose you could argue that counting unlinked trips penalizes areas that have more direct routes between places, but transit agencies don't design systems to game the numbers like that. In the end,
either system has some uncertainty, but using anything other than unlinked trips requires the assembler of data to make guesses about how people are using the system - and guessing isn't very reliable across systems and regions.

Yes some people do a ton of things with little stop overs. But overall the majority of transit riders do not, and the transit authorities have ways of calculating what % transfer, and then they work out the ridership that way.

No offence to the USA, but US transit systems try to get away with using unlinked trips a lot, to make their ridership seem higher then it is. In Canada for example transit systems do not use unlinked trips. Only linked trips.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

...transit authorities have ways of calculating what % transfer
...

Exactly, it's called guesswork, but how do you calculate that across the board to compare between regions? Do you allow the local authority to make the calculation? If so, won't they be biased if they know they're making a number to be compared to other regions? Or do you use a national or international agency to calculate? If you do that, how do they get the expertise to know how each region's customers use their local system? It no doubt varies between regions enough to affect the results of calculations.

So, again, unlinked trips are hard, completely objective numbers. Using any other number is subjective, and comparing subjective numbers between systems is more than a little pointless if you ask me.

Canada may mostly report linked trips, but they do also publish unlinked statistics if you look for them, mostly for comparison internationally. When they do that, their numbers end up looking especially good compared to the U.S. So quit complaining ;-)

[miketoronto]

I personally like linked trip stats, because it is more of a accurate picture of ridership. Each system may have a different way of calculating, but at the end of the day it is mostly the same.

Using the unlinked trips for per capita ridership really really scews how many people actually use transit, and can give the wrong picture.

[Gordo]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

I personally like linked trip stats, because it is more of a accurate picture of ridership. Each system may have a different way of calculating, but at the end of the day it is mostly the same.

Using the unlinked trips for per capita ridership really really scews how many people actually use transit, and can give the wrong picture.

Linked trips are complete guesswork, especially in areas that have multiple transit systems that can be used for one trip. For example, in San Francisco it's quite common for people to use BART for one portion of the trip and MUNI for the rest - is this a linked trip?

Like was said above, unlinked trips are the only way to compare systems from different parts of the country without having to worry about competing methodology to get to linked trips. If all systems are using unlinked trips for comparison, it shouldn't matter if it "skews how many people use transit" - there are other ways of calculating that, and unlinked trips shouldn't (and typically aren't) used for that purpose.

[rsbear]

Isn't automobile usage reported as "unlinked"? Example: If drive from my home to the dry cleaners, that's a trip. If I drive from the dry cleaners to the grocery store, that's counted as another trip. And then the trip from the grocery store back to home is a third trip. Isn't that how the government reports auto trips?

[VivaLFuego]

Originally Posted by emathias

So, again, unlinked trips are hard, completely objective numbers.

Not exactly. On rail systems with free cross-platform transfers and a fixed fare (not zone or distance-based), such as Chicago and New York, you only know where passengers enter, so there is statistical sampling involved in estimating the number of transfers to derive an unlinked trip total.

[J. Will]

Why would you be surpried to see Detroit so low? Detroit is notoriously auto-oriented and has very poor transit service for an area it's population. Detroit also has probably the most dispersed employment of any major metro area in North America. Only a tiny fraction of the region's workers work downtown.

Unlinked trips aren't exact numbers either. If you get on a TTC bus or streetcar with a transit pass, there is no record of you boarding the vehicle (there's no scanning of your card, or recording of your boarding by the driver), so the numbers are estimates.

[miketoronto]

Originally Posted by rsbear

Isn't automobile usage reported as "unlinked"? Example: If drive from my home to the dry cleaners, that's a trip. If I drive from the dry cleaners to the grocery store, that's counted as another trip. And then the trip from the grocery store back to home is a third trip. Isn't that how the government reports auto trips?

We are talking about transit trips with no stop overs.
Nothing is going to be 100 exact in telling you the exact number of people riding each day. But using the calculations they do with linked trips is the best we have. As for people with passes, the transit commission studies what % make transfers, etc, and they factor in the ridership like that.

I just think unlinked tips inflates the numbers.

[Doady]

Originally Posted by emathias

These numbers seem suspect to me.

The population figures obvious cover a different area than normal CMSAs because they're lower than 2000 census number for CMSAs, but I see no way to know what they actually are.

To try to see how things might change if using more standard numbers, I put in 2000 CMSA numbers to see how the numbers changed.

Using year 2000 CMSA population numbers, here's a new list (Urban area (2000 CMSA) Per-capita) - for CMSAs that combined cities, I combined transit ridership to generate the per-capita number.

1) New York-Newark NY-NJ-CT (21,199,865) 167.8
2) Honolulu (876,156) 81.8
3) Washington-Baltimore (7,608,070) 74.9
4) Chicago (9,157,540) 66.7
5) Boston (5,819,100) 66.5
6) San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose (7,039,362) 65.5
7) Philadelphia (6,188,463) 55.3
8) Portland-Vancouver (2,265,223) 47.5
9) Seattle (3,554,760) 47.4
10) Las Vegas (1,563,282) 43.3

This thread is about urban areas, not metro areas. Please read the thread title, thank you.

[BTinSF]

Originally Posted by Cirrus

Surprised to see . . . New Orleans . . . so low.

I'm sure not. I visit NOLA about once a year and every time I wish it had a viable transit system I could use. It has the streetcars (St Charles line, along the river and Canal St.) but those are mainly for tourists and cover only a very limited part of the city. The bus system is infrequent and it's very difficult for an outsider to figure it out since they don't have sell (or give away) maps or any other guidance that would help someone.