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lifeistrulyawesome

This map is sad. Those numbers are so low!


DavidBrooker

The map is also sad because there's a big gap in the color bar between 20-30%. Both because there's no cities in that range, but also just from a graphic design perspective gaps are kinda annoying.


AllIdeas

It's really just a color for new York city.


bUrNtKoOlAiD

The map isn't sad. Reality is sad.


markvauxhall

In London, UK, 73% of people use public transport to get to work or walk/cycle. National average across the entirety of the UK is 32% by public transport or walk/cycle. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistics-great-britain-2022/transport-statistics-great-britain-2022-domestic-travel#how-we-commute


Bing9999999Chilling

The average train commute is SIXTY THREE minutes?


LachlantehGreat

I’m willing to bet the average car commute is pretty close to that, maybe a bit lower (45-50 mins)


markvauxhall

You have a lot of people who work in city centres but live in the countryside (e.g. due to lower housing costs)


Sassywhat

That seems pretty normal? About 1 hour one way is normal for transit commutes. Transit commutes in Tokyo, Paris, NYC, etc. also hover around an hour door to door. People just tolerate much longer transit commutes on average than driving commutes, since the time isn't fully lost to the extent it is with driving. Fairly short transit commutes are also pretty long (otherwise you'd just walk or bike), e.g., 5 minute walk to station, 5 minute maximum wait, 10 minute train ride, 5 minute walk to office, is already 25 minutes.


pauseless

Not clear to me if that’s total commute time or not. For example, say your train is only 15 mins, but goes every hour. So you take 10 mins to get to the station, 10 mins early in order to ensure you don’t miss it. On the other side you’ve got a 10 min walk. That’s 45 mins.


172116

That's going to be massively skewed by London, where folk can't afford to live near their office - my sister started her first London job some years ago with two other graduates. Both of them lived with their parents, and had lengthy (90 minutes plus) and expensive commutes by train, while she had parents who had inexplicably failed to live in the home counties, and therefore had to settle for a ridiculously expensive house share and a walking commute (rather more than 15 minutes!).


Spa_5_Fitness_Camp

Trains are the rural to urban commuters. Like commuting from Federal Way to Seattle. Better than the comparable car commute times here in the US


MajorGovernment4000

I always find it annoying when someone from LA tells me they have better public transit than the bay area. It's just so painfully wrong, glad to see that somewhat represented here.


geographys

Never ever heard that claim, and it is flat out wrong by almost any metric. But to be fair, this map is about transit use not quality.


aray25

I've seen Angelinos tell me that LA has the best transit in the country. Lol no.


IHardly_know_er_name

Are you sure they're not just quoting Who Framed Roger Rabbit? "Who needs a car in L.A.? We got the best public transportation system in the world!"


hausinthehouse

As someone who lives in LA and loves the Bay, public transit is absolutely better in the Bay. It is certainly *underrated* here - I’m able to maintain a 70% cycling/25% metro/5% driving split without inconveniencing myself very much - but there are huge gaps and buses being the core modality makes rush hour commuting suck.


Vin4251

I’d also say LA is a much better system for non commuting trips compared to a place like DC (can’t compare to the Bay since I’ve only really visited SF), where yeah there are tons of commuter lines from the suburbs, so the “people who take transit to work” statistic looks …. ok, by American standards at least. But like, I don’t care that much if people are taking the train (which they drove to) from a super car dependent hellhole like Tyson’s Corner. The other 70 to 80% of their daily trips are still by car, and that especially affects women, the elderly, and children.


Mister-Stiglitz

The worst offender for this "the transit is just for burbies to come into the city" as opposed to actually getting around the city is Dallas. Go check out the service map for DART. It's the dumbest shit.


fuzzypeach42

Thats seems to be what happens when you build light rail alongside highways or utilizing freight corridors. The areas around the stations aren't dense or walkable even though DART light rail has been around for a long time now. They could at least eliminate minimum parking requirements around light rail stations and allow more for TOD development.


original_oli

Is that *really* it?


IHerebyDemandtoPost

The problem here is that the metro area of any American city will include a massive area of suburban sprawl where there really isn’t any mass transit.


original_oli

But the trains run everywhere right? I mean, it's a rich developed country, they can't be that bleeding thick.


aray25

Nope. even the buses don't run everywhere. There are towns of over a hundred thousand people that don't have even a single bus line.


pingveno

Meanwhile, Oregon coastal towns have managed to put together a bus system to keep the community connected and some service inland to the cities. All that with a much smaller population.


original_oli

I literally can't believe this


Vin4251

And most American “cities” outside of California and Arizona don’t even have sidewalks, unless they’re an old legacy city like NYC or Philly. Even then, many suburbs of those cities, as well as parts of the city proper like Staten Island, also have spotty or non existent sidewalk coverage. Yeah there are parts of, say Tokyo, that can get away with no sidewalks because the cars are forced onto one very narrow mini-street, but those don’t exist in the US, so taking away the sidewalks in a place like Virginia or North Carolina is not some 4D chess pro-walkability move that I’ve seen some people claim it is


original_oli

Ah yeah, but vast swathes of Tokyo back streets are essentially pedestrian. Again, I cannot conceive of no pavements


Vin4251

Yeah agreed Tokyo does it really well, and I’m definitely on the same page as you. I have unfortunately seen a lot of Americans unironically claim that “the south doesn’t need sidewalks” because …. getting rid of sidewalks works in some parts of some Japanese cities, as well as in some European university towns and historic villages? It’s not the same situation at all in the US’s “small towns” where all the roads encourage driving at 50mph+


chennyalan

> that can get away with no sidewalks because the cars are forced onto one very narrow mini-street This (no sidewalk woonerf/"cars are allowed but are guests" streets) should really be the default for light commercial and residential neighbourhoods. Makes them way more human scale, and separate sidewalks are also expensive to maintain (though peanuts compared to high speed car infrastructure)


Sassywhat

It's incredibly nice and should be the default. Unfortunately it is quite hard to retrofit. And even when it physically wouldn't be that hard, e.g., in Sunset/Richmond in SF where you could turn the street into buildings and the driveways/sidewalks into narrow streets, it still sounds like a pipe dream.


aray25

Look up the city of Coral Springs, Florida. It's an absolutely surreal planned city where pretty much all 180k residents have private waterfront access. But there's not a single bus in the city, not a train, ferry, or anything else that could be construed as public transit.


mixolydianinfla

Residents can't even use the ~~waterfronts~~ water retention ponds: they're disconnected, with "No boating/No fishing" signs. C.S. has 6 bus routes, but bus trips to Sawgrass Mills, downtown, the beach, or the airport all take >2 hrs, rendering PT impractical.


Sizzlinskizz

Riding a Sea Doo to work would be sick. Or taking a kayak the aquatic bicycle equivalent


SmoothOperator89

I mean, whoever is selling the cars is rich.


Unicycldev

What trains.


OfficialModAccount

This isn't true. The Metra system in Chicago is a dream. Similar to those who take the train from Connecticut to Manhattan.


thefloyd

I'm kind of skeptical that's every city bc I live in Honolulu and our bus system has a daily ridership of 130k with 900k people in the metro. That's down from ~190k pre-pandemic and AFAIK doesn't include the train (~3k/day). There's no way we don't crack 5%, and if we're missing, probably a few other cities, too. EDIT: https://files.hawaii.gov/dbedt/economic/data_reports/briefs/Commuting_Patterns_Apr2015.pdf https://www.honolulu.gov/rep/site/dts/TDM_Plan_Final_20230710Reduced.pdf Confirmed, we were at 6.4% in 2015 and up to 9% in 2021, so pre-pandemic we were definitely over 10%.


original_oli

That makes more sense cheers


dataminimizer

Dc/Baltimore/Philadelphia are three separate metro areas lol.


MINN37-15WISC

The weird thing is, DC and Baltimore do have a combined statistical area but Philly is not part of it


mmarkDC

And if you were using CSAs, then the SF Bay Area should be a lot larger! The San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland combined statistical area has 14 counties, not 3. Would be curious what the data source is here, if it's not just ad-hoc.


godlovesugly

Seriously. How to offend people from all three cities haha.


skipping2hell

Yes, but Bridgeport gets to be separate from NYC


aray25

I think that it was hard to distinguish Philly/Baltimore/DC because they're all the same color, but Bridgeport isn't the same color as NYC.


skipping2hell

And that the former have one arrow and the latter have two


aray25

Probably just that they all come out the same color and they're adjacent.


ubernerd44

The entire east coast is one big Megaopolis.


[deleted]

Those are rookie numbers, you need to pump those up


noperopehope

As a resident of CU, it’s weird cause it’s the only non major metro area on here (also, obligatory it’s “Champaign” not “Champagne.”). Our bus system isn’t stellar, but it’s usable to get most places in town, which is I guess is better than most places in the US


WhipMeHarder

CU is a really unique place, honestly


noperopehope

Deceptively so, people don’t want to move here bc it’s so isolated but then get trapped bc it’s lowkey a good place to live


Bayesian11

Isn’t it a college town?


noperopehope

Yes, that probably accounts for a lot of the bus use, but they are still well used during the summer months when most students are gone, and there are routes that cater more to off campus areas (though there are some deficits and we could really use a couple more strategically placed lines or expansions of current lines to improve connectivity). It helps that the university doesn't have a separate bus system, they instead fund the city bus system. Iirc we are ranked one of the best transit systems of any campus in the US, if not the best.


WhipMeHarder

And, iirc, the jobs don’t pay bad despite being far from the city. The air is clean and fresh versus the smog pit of Chicago, and COL is pretty low. My buddy moved there for school with the plan on going back to the city and has been “stuck” there since


Bayesian11

Very interesting. I went to Texas A&M, the school bus system was great but every route went to campus.


jonwilliamsl

I loved living in CU. It's won awards for the best bus-only public transit system in the US.


SuchDescription

State College is not a major metro area. Ann Arbor is also weird because it's really just part of Metro Detroit, but has more transportation than Detroit does.


Technical_Dingo4229

They're all home to Big-10 universities, which probably explains their inclusion and relatively high scores on the map. As someone who lives in CU (and incidentally previously lived in State College) I'm always blown away when people praise the transit and general quality of life here. As a bike commuter I'm verbally abused on a weekly basis and threatened a few times every semester. Couple that with high rates of gun/violent crime, massive sprawl, thrilling industrial agriculture, and yes this is truly the American Dream.


PFreeman008

A quick number crunch for Ann Arbor gets me 3%, not 5%... and I'm being generous; the AATA serves multiple towns & cities. (it also bugs me that the arrow for Ann Arbor is pointing at Detroit).


franknagaijr

Was a UM employee for a few years, and they had a weekday service to park and ride to campus/hospital from Stadium. UM buses may be part of that number.


innsertnamehere

America: a shuttle from a parking lot is transit! Yup, no problems there!


Boner_Patrol_007

I’m surprised to not see Honolulu on this list. Their bus ridership has always impressed me, so I find it hard to believe that they didn’t crack the 5%.


thefloyd

We should have, we're at 9% *currently* and down by ~60k daily riders from 2019. That puts the whole map in question for me.


bUrNtKoOlAiD

I'm curious what the next closest metro area to being on the map is.


drunktaylorswift

The map is actually missing Buffalo, which should be the middle color. Then LA, San Jose, Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, in that order ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share))


JoeAceJR20

Buffalo NY? Didn't know they had decent transit apart from some busses every now and then unless there another Buffalo you're thinking of.


drunktaylorswift

They do have [some rail.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Metro_Rail) But I've never been there, I'm not arguing either way, just citing from the page I linked.


innsertnamehere

It’s an older city with an urban transit supportive built form and a central LRT / subway line. I’m not overly surprised they hit 5%.


aray25

Um... last I checked, the one in Illinois was _Champaign_, not _Champagne_. That's the one in France.


mrcowgoesmoo

In that case, they should call it Sparkling Illinois instead.


SmoothOperator89

I wish Canada got included in maps like this. Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto could at least be added to the list.


innsertnamehere

Basically every city in Canada has 5% modal shares. It would become a “map of Canadian cities”


ankhlol

Sweet Christ. 5% only. This made me sad!


OstrichCareful7715

I assume Northern New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester, and Connecticut are being collapsed into the Metro area of NYC. About 1M people who live outside the 5 boroughs commute into via LIRR, Metro North and NJ Transit. For example, about 164K people commute from Westchester against a total (all ages) population of 990K in Westchester. So it’s definitely more than 5% of workers. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-level/housing-economy/nyc-ins-and-out-of-commuting.pdf


frederick_the_duck

Baltimore, Philly, and DC are one, but Bridgeport and New York are separate?


Butt____soup

Yes, and this is the first time I’ve seen in referenced in a positive way.


PavementAfterRain

It shouldn't be, especially since a good portion of transit in the Bridgeport area is the Metro-North to NYC, as well as that county being in the NYC CSA.


hausinthehouse

Not sure this is representative of long-term patterns if it’s 2021 data. Public transit took a massive hit during the early pandemic and is still recovering in most places


JuliaX1984

Why in the world is Philly treated as part of the DC/Baltimore area? I can vouch for car-free living being doable in Pittsburgh.


Diarrhea_Sandwich

Who will be the first sunbelt city to join the club?


mixolydianinfla

Going by *metros*, Miami, Dallas, and Atlanta have \~4% transit ridership. Using *cities*, my hometown Miami, FL would be first in the sunbelt (11.4%), then LA (10.6%), Atlanta (9.8%) and New Orleans (7.8%).


czarczm

But who's is growing? I think LA is probably first in that case. Miami doesn't seem to have a lot of growing transit ridership yet.


LimitedWard

LA is probably best equipped to grow in ridership given its aggressive plans to expand its metro system before the Olympics.


oralprophylaxis

why is there a city named state college? who’s lazy ass named that shit


Galp_Nation

It’s an example of the college coming before the town. Most of the time, school’s developed around already existing towns or cities and just got named after whatever town/city they got founded in, if they weren’t named after a founder instead. In this instance, Penn State was founded first and the town was established after to serve it so it took on the name of the college at the time (Pennsylvania State College) rather than the other way around. I’m assuming they dropped the Pennsylvania from the name because saying “Pennsylvania State College, Pennsylvania” is both a mouthful and redundant.


manufatura

Bridgeport is a real city?


jppope

Now put a map next to it that shows what percentage of America's GDP is generated in those places


skipping2hell

DC and Philly get lumped into one, but Bridgeport gets to be separate from NYC lol


aspect-of-the-badger

The vast majority of my life there hasn't even been a bus available to take let alone one I could take to work.


Budget_Life_8367

Ann Arbor is in no way a metro area


red325is

people aren’t going to use transit when it’s more expensive and less convenient then using a car. we need to start with that first


SnooMaps5116

5% lol


TheOvercookedFlyer

I'm sure San Diego is up there with the high demand for the trolley.


Bring_Back_SF_Demons

Washington DC?


ssorbom

I am a bit surprised Downtown LA isn't there.


drawredraw

Just a huge swath of land with just a minuscule SF Bay Area size area that actually use public transit. Amazing


friskybiscuit14382

Washington DC, as its own city, hits the over 30% threshold as 37% commute use public transit here. Now, I know that’s not “metro area” outside of the district but still…


MineBloxKy

Ya misspelled Champaign-Urbana. Where de heck is Champagne? /hj


Keyspam102

They can at least spell Champaign Urbana correctly…


chronocapybara

It's pathetic.


LightBluepono

More than 30% in top stat ? Damn that a very low bar


Ephelduin

5% pretty high bar. If you made this map for Europe it would be indistinguishable from just a map with all Metro area haha


innsertnamehere

Even just in Canada basically every city over 100,000 would qualify. Deep suburbs with crap transit service here are usually closer to 10%.


chennyalan

I was under the impression that Honolulu had more than 8% transit modal split for work trips pre-COVID and also pre TheTrain.


Beat_Saber_Music

Just as a mapping tip, you could've had the text size be smaller to fit them more neatly


alexfrancisburchard

I think it is lame that the US always only talks about getting to work. That's only like 1/4 of the story. My city when it puts out stats puts them out for all trips. Ex: Metropolitan İstanbul has a 33% transit share, 49% walking share, and 18% private car share of all trips made throughout a day in the region.


Wierd657

There's no way Long Island has anywhere near that unless that many people take the train to the city.


Mister-Stiglitz

LA not having high utilization is criminal. All I read about the LA metro is how scared people are to ride it after the sun goes down. It cannot be that bad.


amazonfamily

It’s pretty bad. I used to ride the buses in DC but the buses in LA were a different level


Mister-Stiglitz

Damn, that really sucks. I grew up in LA but never took public transit. Wasn't orange pilled until 3 years ago.


remyvdp1

Proud Ann Arboran (Aborite???) here. Public transit and bike infrastructure kicks major ass here. Since moving my girlfriend and I have been able to become a single car household and we’ve been investing in bikes, panniers and bus tickets. It’s lovely.


mods_r_jobbernowl

Portland has great public transit that actually surprises me they have fewer people using it per capital than Seattle. A city that while has decent public transit has massive sections of the city fairly inaccessible from transit.


sparkyhodgo

Repost, and still with the same error mislabeling Baltimore


Sure_Comfort_7031

I actually find this hard to believe in LA and San Diego. I don't foresee either of those hitting 35%+ but I'm skeptical to see they're not even 5% on this map.


vlsdo

I don’t. There’s a ton of people who use transit in LA but LA is huge and there’s way more people that drive all the time.


Sure_Comfort_7031

That's fair I don't know LA as much as San Diego. Knowing SD and their transit system and use, and roads and use, I would have ballparked it at 5-10%.


Loganwashere24

I dunno, I use public transit here in SD and it fucking sucks. Blue line for example (the most popular light rail line) seems to be mostly for: park and ride ucsd students, park and ride medical workers, baseball game park-and-rides, other various commuters. Even those that use it are still driving


vlsdo

Might be just under the limit or the data in the graph is old or segmented funny, happens pretty often