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ChineseHow we stand in California
Wad’s post about LA having the 4th best downtown got me thinking about how we rank in terms of public transit.
So I looked up the 11 cities in California with populations over 300,000 (the cutoff used by Paul Shigley), and looked up a wee bit about their public transit options.
OK, so here are the cities in CA with populations over 300,000 (in decreasing order). (For your edification, I put the name of the rail service provider, if there was one). (Source for most of this info came from Wikipedia’s entry on light rail. It’s woefully out of date, but I don’t have the wherewithall to fix it.)
Los Angeles (Metro and Metrolink)
San Diego (Trolley)
San Jose (VTA)
San Francisco (Muni and BART)
Long Beach (Metro)
Fresno (none)
Sacramento (SacRT)
Oakland (BART)
Santa Ana (Metrolink)
Anaheim (Metrolink)
Bakersfield (none)
In terms of ridership (according this article in Wikipedia, unless otherwise specified), here’s the ranking of our cities:
SF/Oakland BART (320,000 riders per day) (source)
SF Muni (145,000 rpd) (SF Muni’s webpage says 700,000, but this includes the busses as well as rail)
LA/Long Beach Metro (128,100 rpd) (Metro’s webpage says 275,000 for Red, Green, Blue, and Gold lines)
SD Trolley (96,700 rpd) (SD Trolley’s website says 75,000 rpd)
Sacramento RT (49,800 rpd) (SacRT’s website says 14 million/year, or 39,000 rpd)
LA/Santa Ana/Anaheim Metrolink (32,000 rpd) (source)
San Jose VTA (29,800 rpd) (VTA’s website says 27,000 rpd)
I would love to hear what the Metroriders think of these in terms of public transit. Who’s the best?
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
Those aren’t riders. Those are boardings. For BART it is close to 1 rider per 2 boardings but for LAMTA nothing even remotely close to 1:2.
Oh, and Bakersfield still isn’t 300k population. GIGO.
Do you mean that MTA has more boardings per rider? Why do you think LAMTA is so different from BART?
I figure I have a couple of mixed statistics in that list, so I wouldn’t put too much faith in the exact numbers. Some are averages, others are weekday averages.
Not sure what “GIGO” means. Bakersfield may be smaller than 300,000, but the ranking is probably still accurate. We could add Riverside and Stockton to the list, because they are close behind. But they have no rail either.
It’s unlikely that MUNI has 700,000 boardings per day. The entire city of San Francisco has less than 700,000 people, and the usual statistic is that 33% of its population rides transit, and that would be shared with BART. It’s possible that they are including tourists riding the F streetcar and the cable cars, though.
The reason that some people think that boardings in LA are not 2:1 is because of the high rate of transfers, but I have always doubted the accuracy of those figures, because they are estimates.
Overall transit ridership in LA is a lower percentage of the population than SF, but a higher absolute number. That’s just a function of the higher population in general.
Anyway, Rob Dawg is generally anti-transit, but there are lot of us who do ride it, and it’s pretty clear that the numbers are far higher than reported. The honor system is a terrible way to measure ridership, you know.
Here’s a few more commuter rail systems:
CalTrain (SF/SJ): 33,841 rpd
Coaster (SD): 3000 rpd (6k boardings)
ACE (Stockton/SJ): 1500 rpd
Looks like I was wrong about Stockton! Thanks Nichk!
Actually, I don’t think 700,000 rides in a day is unlikely for SF, if you are counting the underground, the busses, the F line, and the cable cars. The city’s population is only 800,000, but a large number of people commute in from the rest of the bay area using public transit (often switching onto MUNI from BART or ferries, or whatever).
And yes, there are a large number of tourists in SF, and large number of them take transit at least once during their stay. SF is one of the few cities in the world where the public transit is itself a major tourist attraction! (Where else? NYC? Possibly New Orleans?)
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But back to the thread, here’s my tentative rankings for these cities, based on what little information/experience I have:
1-2. SF/Oakland
3-4. LA/Long Beach
5. San Jose
6. San Diego
7. Sacramento
8-9. Anaheim and Santa Ana
10-11. Central Valley (Fresno and Bakersfield).
The rankings for 5,6, and 7 are really guesses for me.
You do include Muni buses, but not LA Mero buses, which have 1.5 million boardings per day. Why not?
Oh, I was just saying that 700,000 doesn’t sound unlikely when you count all the busses. I wasn’t comparing that number to LA’s 275,000 rpd.
Right, but the overall numbers of the LA Metro ridership (bus and ail) are far higher than the overall ridership of the SF Muni/Bart (bus and rail). Don’t you agree?
There’s only one place to go. The National Transit Database. For instance; BART may brag and say 320k BART boardings on their own website but the NTD submitted datum says 284k. That’s because the NTD is standardized and on their own BART says anything it wants.
http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/pubs/profiles/2006/agency_profiles/9003.pdf
MUNI (#9015) is equally vastly overstated.
Thanks for sharing your sources, Rob. I would not be surprised to learn that these agencies overstate their ridership on their webpages.
But the link you shared says that BART has “343,026 average weekday unlinked trips.” Not sure where you got the 284k (unless I’m misinterpretting what they mean by “average weekday unlinked trips”). This number is also higher than the statistic provided by BART’s webpage.
As for MUNI, I still think that the figure they provide (i.e., 700k) is reasonable for number of rides per day. Any evidence to the contrary?
I don’t have hard evidence that SF MUNI is lower than you say, except for having lived there for 8 years and riding it all the time. The entire city is 7 miles across, the streetcars are only one or 2 cars long, and are rarely crowded except at rush hour. There is NO WAY the ridership is that high, IMO.
Rating systems by passengers per day makes ones like SF Muni look pretty good–lots of short trips. If you rate them by passenger miles, you get a different picture.
Metrolink: 359,938,222
LACMTA: 1,850,220,494
BART: 1,307,104,673 annually
SF Muni: 429,548,187
CalTrain: 238,610,558
Both number of boardings and passenger miles describe the amount of “work” a system is doing, in slightly different ways.
I think if you wanted to come up with one number that did it all, you could sum the log of the mileage of each trip or something.
Ah, so this thread has given me an idea. This might be old and obvious to those of you immersed professionally in the world of transit. But to an entomologist like me, it’s new.
A high number of passenger-miles is a good metric for measuring the effectiveness of transit at removing cars from the road (and subsequently reducing congestion, air pollution, etc.).
But a high number of boardings (relative to the region’s population) suggests that public transit is well integrated into people’s daily lives. It implies a regularity of usage.
San Francisco has a population of 800k, and boardings per day range from 25%-85% of that, depending on whose numbers you trust.
If LA (pop ~4M) is about as transit-oriented as SF, then we should see between 1-3M boardings per day.
Aside from the arguments about data quality, and scope of the study (e.g., which cities to include in the pop count, and which transit providers to include), do you agree with this approach? Would such a metric indicate if Angelenos are as transit-oriented as our neighbors to the North?
the link you shared says that BART has “343,026 average weekday unlinked trips.” Not sure where you got the 284k (unless I’m misinterpretting what they mean by “average weekday unlinked trips”). This number is also higher than the statistic provided by BART’s webpage.
There are 7 days in the week. Near every operational cost in a transit budget is 24/7/365 with the usual weekend/holiday adjustments. Transit agencies like to juggle a little bit. Thus the double shift weekend mantainence isn’t even prorated but the M-F ridership gets extrapolated.
Nick, your numbers for commuter rail are inconsistent. For ACE and coaster you count riders (boardings/2) but for Caltrain, you count boardings. The correct ridership number for Caltrain is 16920.
What’s the ultimate transit statistic that shows how a good a job a system is doing?
I would say it would compare total daily average riders (not boardings) with the number of people who COULD POTENTIALLY use the system, that is, people who live within 1/2 mile of transit stations or bus stops.
Then you divide the actual riders versus potential riders, and you get a transit usage percentage.
The one problem with that statistic, Scott, is that you’re not accounting for service frequencies.
L.A. already has 98% potential transit ridership, by virtue of being a half-mile away from a bus stop. But that’s not much help when the buses run hourly.
Or, it could lead to misleading results for systems such as the downtown DASH, where lines can have overall good daily ridership but horrible productivity. In other words, DASH buses are well used even though on routes that run every 5 minutes, the buses carry few people.
Blah blah blah numbers. Blah blah blah statistics.
From a completely comfort, ease and convenience point of view, I’ll take BART/Muni any day. My family lives in the East Bay and I’ve never needed a car when going to visit them and wanting to get in to the city. For a place that is completely walkable SF puts LA to shame with the ease and convenience of its public transportation. It’s a real city, bringing people together with places they may not have gone if it weren’t for for the transport.
Having just moved back here from London, I’m ashamed of LA’s lack of convenient transportation. Sure, I’d still much rather sit on the air conditioned bus with my book than in my car, however it’s not easy and it’s not convenient. The end.
Unfortunately the riders don’t care about the numbers. At the end of the day, the numbers are only a result of the ease/cost etc of the transportation. It doesn’t matter how many light rails LA has, unless it goes to the places the tourists want to go, it will never have the ridership of the “real” cities like SF, NYC, Chicago and Boston.
Er, in my opinion.