We’ll discuss the Canadian cities another time, and you’re probably not surprised to see NYC and the San Francisco Bay area near the top of a list of urban areas with high transit use. But let’s ponder Ames and Hanford, as well as places such as Champaign, Ill., State College, Pa., Blacksburg Va., and Honolulu, Hawaii.

How to lead the country in transit trips per capita

Seeking to predict which urban areas might have high UPT per capita, I found five factors that collectively provided a good indication of whether an urban area might be able to have at least 20 UPT per capita.

Population density: This is obvious, but it’s important. Transit works well, and is well-used, in areas with high population densities. Not everyplace is San Francisco/Oakland (the most densely populated urban area in the U.S.), but nearly all U.S. urban areas with more than 20 UPT per capita have a population density of at least 2,000 persons per square mile.

Locally derived financial support: This category includes farebox receipts, social service or college/university contract revenue, local sales or property taxes dedicated to transit, and allocations from the general revenues of local governments. Whatever the source(s), you need to generate at least 10 percent of your operating budget from these or other local sources in order to generate more than 20 UPT per capita. Ideally, you generate more local funding than that, but you need at least 10 percent to be on the path to greatness.

Non-federal financial support: Whether done completely with local resources (see above), or with the use of some state-generated funds, urban areas need to derive at least 60 percent of their operating budgets from non-federal sources in order to generate more than 20 UPT per capita.

Heavily deployed transit fleet: To get a lot of people in an urban area riding transit a lot of the time, you need a lot of service – bus service – on the street. One predictor for generating at least 20 UPT per capita is the number of vehicle revenue-hours (VRH) divided by the number of vehicles (all modes) operated in maximum service (VOMS). If you have at least 2,400 VRH/VOMS, there’s a good chance you’ll reach at least 20 UPT per capita.

Fixed-route bus intensity: Another transit statistic that matters here is the number of fixed-route bus vehicle revenue-hours (FR-VRH) per capita. Yes, it must be fixed-route bus; we’ll discuss rail, microtransit, and other modes another time. Among the top urban areas in this particular metric are Champaign Ill., Ithaca N.Y., and Honolulu, Hawaii. But wherever you are, if you can provide at least 0.75 FR-VRH per capita on the street, you’re likely to land in the 20+ club of unlinked passenger trips per capita.

Having tossed a lot of quantitative stuff onto the table, we’ll be talking next about how it’s the community that helps make for great transit, not just the bus.