When all of the above factors line up, what sort of community do we see? Here are three examples from my home state of California. In the San Francisco – Oakland urban area, transit services are provided by SF Muni, AC Transit, Golden Gate Transit, WestCAT, SamTrans, and many more bus, rail, and ferry operators. Because the Bay Area is hemmed in by mountains and water, its geography steers growth, land-use and housing patterns to some of the highest population densities in North America.

A major side effect of high density is that it drives up the costs associated with both housing and commercial property to sometimes sky-high levels; combined with the roadway congestion that also accompanies this density, these factors tend to trigger high levels of transit demand throughout the region, with more (and longer) trips crossing multiple jurisdictional boundaries.

As any current or former Californian can attest, the Golden State collects a lot of taxes from its residents. Since 1971, a dedicated portion of statewide sales tax receipts have been distributed to local transportation authorities and other agencies to support transit and transit-related projects. Local governments in California frequently supplement these state-collected transit funds with various local dollars to further support the transit needed by their high-density communities. The Bay Area is no exception to this practice.

Located in the heart of California’s Central Valley, Hanford may not seem like the sort of place that would have 3661 residents per square mile within its urban area. Actually, it’s fairly common for historically agricultural communities (like Hanford, other ag-oriented small cities in the U.S., and many of the medium and small cities in Canada) to have developed in surprisingly compact ways. Those patterns then remain in place for a long, long time. Whatever the reasons, Hanford, like all but one of the Central Valley’s 20 urban areas, is fairly compact and densely populated. As a result of this blend of density and the generous support of state and local government, KART’s buses and CalVans’ vanpools provide a high level of transit service in and around Hanford.

In some ways, Santa Barbara shares similarities with the Bay Area. Sure, there’s more sun and less fog, and it’s a fraction the size, population-wise (just over 200,000 residents, compared to SFO’s urban population of 3.3 million), but both areas face significant geographic limitations, high density, and high costs of living and of property. State and local governments in the Santa Barbara area follow what you’ve now seen is a standard pattern in California of blending significant state-distributed transit-dedicated sales tax revenues with additional, locally collected, transit-dedicated tax receipts, further augmented with allocations from local governments’ other tax collection streams.

You get the picture, don’t you? For an area to have great transit, it helps to have a combination of transit-favorable geography, housing and land use. Most importantly, though, there needs to be a commitment from state and local governments to invest in transit as a solution for what otherwise – at least in the case of many California urban areas, but also for many places that aren’t in my home state – would be an intolerable cauldron of traffic congestion and unmitigatable costs of living.

Next, we’ll dig a little deeper, examining when, and how, a community may be ripe for hosting some great transit.