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Posted Mar 20, 2024, 3:47 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: New York
Posts: 10,125
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Eh, NYC is hugely anomalous. And I don't doubt, even in the NYC area, a very large number of people avoid transit due to typical U.S. negative associations. I've heard it, many times.
DC has a system designed in conjunction with federal employment centers, with strong top-down usage incentivization. Again, quite anomalous. And still not great ridership, compared to Canada or Western Europe.
And I'd argue Chicago and especially Philly are very much underperformers, in part due to race. Chicago and Philly with Vancouver or Toronto or London (UK) demographics would have much higher ridership.
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My point is that the difference in transit usage/development within the United States does not show a strong bias towards places that have fewer minorities. Chicago may not be able to compare to similarly sized cities in Europe, but transit in Chicago quite easily blows away transit in almost any city in America that is not NYC.
Using the Jan 2024 data from APTA, I calculated a ratio of the trips per person for the 48 largest metros in the U.S. Here's the list of metros and their average trips per person:
Metros ranked by trips per resident- New York--Jersey City--Newark, NY--NJ: 148.9
- San Francisco--Oakland, CA: 54.4
- Boston, MA--NH: 47.4
- San Diego, CA: 40.7
- Seattle--Tacoma, WA: 36.9
- Washington--Arlington, DC--VA--MD: 36.7
- Chicago, IL--IN: 33.1
- Philadelphia, PA--NJ--DE--MD: 32.7
- Portland, OR--WA: 30.5
- Los Angeles--Long Beach--Anaheim, CA: 29.8
- Salt Lake City, UT: 26.7
- Las Vegas--Henderson--Paradise, NV: 25.4
- Baltimore, MD: 23.8
- Denver--Aurora, CO: 22.9
- Pittsburgh, PA: 20.3
- Minneapolis--St. Paul, MN: 16.5
- New Orleans, LA: 15.7
- Milwaukee, WI: 15.6
- Miami--Fort Lauderdale, FL: 14.8
- Buffalo, NY: 13.9
- Hartford, CT: 12.6
- San Antonio, TX: 12.6
- Phoenix--Mesa--Scottsdale, AZ: 12.1
- Atlanta, GA: 11.9
- Cleveland, OH: 11.5
- Austin, TX: 11.3
- Houston, TX: 10.0
- San Jose, CA: 9.7
- Orlando, FL: 9.6
- Charlotte, NC--SC: 9.4
- St. Louis, MO--IL: 9.1
- Dallas--Fort Worth--Arlington, TX: 8.4
- Providence, RI--MA: 8.1
- Richmond, VA: 8.1
- Tampa--St. Petersburg, FL: 7.5
- Cincinnati, OH--KY: 7.4
- Kansas City, MO--KS: 7.2
- Sacramento, CA: 6.7
- Columbus, OH: 6.6
- Raleigh, NC: 6.3
- Nashville-Davidson, TN: 5.7
- Louisville/Jefferson County, KY--IN: 5.5
- Jacksonville, FL: 5.0
- Virginia Beach--Norfolk, VA: 4.4
- Riverside--San Bernardino, CA: 4.1
- Detroit, MI: 4.0
- Indianapolis, IN: 3.5
- Memphis, TN--MS--AR: 2.9
I then averaged the % population that is Black for all of these metros (16%). Then I looked to see if there was a correlation between low ridership and metros with a larger percentage of Black residents. To do that I just counted the Blacker than average metros and looked to see if they skewed to metros with lower trips per person. There was a slight skew towards lower ridership in Blacker metros, but by no means a dramatic skew:
Percent of Blacker than average metros by quartile
Top: 20%
Q3: 25%
Q2: 25%
Q1: 30%
The skew can also be easily explained by geography. All of the top ridership metros are on the (north) East or West coasts (plus Chicago). Metros in the northeast are just about evenly split between Blacker than average or not. Only one city on the (north) East Coast city shows up in the bottom half at all: Providence. But Providence has a below average Black percentage, and is pretty middle of the road among northeast metros for Black percentage, so this does not support the racism theory.
The bottom quartile is dominated by metros in the South and Midwest (but mostly South). Southern metros do skew Blacker than the rest of the country, but there doesn't seem to be a regional skew towards better transit usage in less Black metros. Like the other regions, it seems that the transit usage is kind of random:
Southern metros (percentage Black) listed by trips per resident- New Orleans, LA (33.3%) , trips per person: 15.7
- Miami--Fort Lauderdale, FL (19.5%) , trips per person: 14.8
- San Antonio, TX (7.1%) , trips per person: 12.6
- Atlanta, GA (34.2%) , trips per person: 11.9
- Austin, TX (7.0%) , trips per person: 11.3
- Houston, TX (18.0%) , trips per person: 10.0
- Orlando, FL (15.4%) , trips per person: 9.6
- Charlotte, NC--SC (21.9%) , trips per person: 9.4
- Dallas--Fort Worth--Arlington, TX (16.0%) , trips per person: 8.4
- Richmond, VA (27.7%) , trips per person: 8.1
- Tampa--St. Petersburg, FL (11.8%) , trips per person: 7.5
- Raleigh, NC (18.3%) , trips per person: 6.3
- Nashville-Davidson, TN (14.3%) , trips per person: 5.7
- Louisville/Jefferson County, KY--IN (14.8%) , trips per person: 5.5
- Jacksonville, FL (21.2%) , trips per person: 5.0
- Virginia Beach--Norfolk, VA (30.3%) , trips per person: 4.4
- Memphis, TN--MS--AR (45.8%) , trips per person: 2.9
New Orleans and Atlanta are among the Blackest metros in the south and they have higher transit numbers than some of the whitest metros. But Memphis and Virginia Beach are also among the Blackest metros and have pretty low transit numbers. So there's no clear correlation between race and transit usage even in this geography.
Anyway, I think racism (well racial segregation plus suburbanization) may have scuttled some of the more ambitious government led plans to build transit in the latter half of the 20th century, but that's pretty much the only time in history where that was probably true. To take Detroit as an example, which is a pretty glaring regional outlier at the bottom of the list of trips per resident, that was a city with one of the most expansive rail transit systems in the world in the mid 20th century. The reason that no longer exists was a policy decision, and it was a very unpopular decision among Detroit residents of all races at the time.
So, I somewhat strongly disagree that racism is the fundamental reason that this country has fallen behind on mass transit. I think the fundamental reason has to do with policy and, to a lesser extent, historical precedent. The historical precedent is that the federal government did not/does not view mass transit as a prerogative of the federal government, so there is no national standard of mass transit. That has led state and local governments to decide on their own how much of their resources to dedicate to mass transit. I suspect that the Canadian government has fostered more of a national consensus on mass transit.
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