By Chris Zeilinger
Do We Know Great Transit When We See It?
October 8, 2024
Recently, I was asked “Does anyplace in the U.S. have transit that’s as great as Winnipeg’s?” It’s a fascinating question, which I’ll be exploring with you over the coming months.
Great transit: do we know it when we see it?
Every so often, a local official or other community leader will tell me what great transit they have in their area. But what do they mean by that?
Generally, I hear the greatness of transit systems defined in qualitative terms: transit that’s responsive, valued, and used in ways that appreciably benefit their community and its members. Those are hard things to measure, even though they really do speak to how well the transit system serves, and is used by, its community.
When we dig into the details, more measurable things come into view: great transit is reliably on-time, its frequency more than meets the general expectations of the community, and it’s highly used.
Aha! If an area’s transit is great, that suggests people are using it – a lot. People are less likely to use their area’s transit if it’s not so great. This is pretty obvious, but how we get there is more of a challenge.
Can we calculate greatness in transit?
Let’s start with ridership. More trips taken on transit in an area must mean something, right? Almost every public transit system in North America reports their ridership, typically in terms of “unlinked passenger trips” (UPTs). However, 18 million unlinked passenger trips on transit in the Detroit urban area (pop. 3.8 million) might have a different significance than 17 million UPTs in the Tucson urban area (pop. just over 875,000).
(Check out our recent press release on this subject, Community Transportation Association of America Unveils New Data Presentation on Urban Transit Ridership Per Capita.)
We need to adjust for population. To do that, let’s look at “unlinked passenger trips per capita” (i.e., the total number of unlinked passenger trips in an urban area, divided by the number of people who live there). It’s a blunt measurement, but this does indicate how much an area’s transit is used by its residents.
In 2023, the Detroit urban area had 4.81 UPT per capita. That’s pretty respectable in terms of transit use around the U.S., where the median among urban areas is 3.70. Tucson, in comparison, had 20.04 UPT per capita.
That doesn’t mean Sun Tran and the other transit services in Tucson are four times better than the network of transit services in the Detroit area; they’re simply different.
I think we’re on to something. Look at some more areas’ transit numbers in 2023 from various places in the U.S. and Canada:
- New York City/Jersey City/Newark NY/NJ (urban area pop. 19.4 million), 167.85 UPT per capita
- Toronto Ontario, Canada (urban area pop. 5.6 million), 158.07 UPT per capita
- Ames, Iowa (urban area pop. 66K), 68.47 UPT per capita
- Jackson, Wyo. (rural pop. 11K), 61.82 UPT per capita
- Blacksburg/Christiansburg, Va. (urban area pop. 72K), 50.26 UPT per capita
- Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (urban area pop. 760K), 50.10 UPT per capita
- Honolulu, Hawaii (urban area pop. 853K), 49.04 UPT per capita
- Watauga County, N.C. (rural pop. 54K), 23.10 UPT per capita
- Tucson, Ariz. (urban area pop. 875K), 20.04 UPT per capita
Are you wondering what contributes to great transit around the U.S.? We’ll discuss that further in the next installment of this journey we’re taking in search of transit greatness.
The Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) and its members believe that mobility is a basic human right. From work and education to life-sustaining health care and human services programs to shopping and visiting with family and friends, mobility directly impacts quality of life.