By Chris Zeilinger
When Is a Community Ripe for Great Transit?
December 12, 2024
In many of our largest cities, we see how transit shapes the community and its identity, whether it’s the London Underground, the NYC subway, the combination of San Francisco’s cable cars and BART trains, or Toronto and its streetcars. But how do we generalize from those examples to see transit’s role in a broader range of communities? Let’s look at two places you might not have been eyeing as great transit cities.
State College and Sudbury: A Tale of Two Transit Cities
There’s no one magic solution to the problem of how to make a community great through its transit services, but State College, Pa., and Sudbury, Ontario, Canada offer some interesting lessons.
The urbanized portions of Sudbury and State College have comparable populations: roughly 92,000 and 84,000, respectively (the city limits of Greater Sudbury also include a lot of less-urban areas, which is why the city’s population is 166,000). They have nearly equal population densities of close to 3200 persons per square mile. These both are moderately dense, modestly populous, urban areas.
In 2023, Sudbury’s GOVA buses had 5.2 million unlinked passenger trips, and State College’s Centre Area Transportation Authority (CATA) buses had 5.0 million UPTs. Whoa – that’s a lot of trips for cities of this size; what’s that about?
One element is relative geographic isolation. Neither city is terribly remote, but they both are the largest place within a significant radius of their downtown core. It’s 150 miles from State College to Pittsburgh, and Toronto’s 250 miles from Sudbury. This regional significance makes them magnets for jobs and other economic activity, healthcare and social services, education, cultural amenities, etc.
Do these cities’ high transit use relate to demographics? As its name suggests, State College is dominated by the presence of a large university. Adults ages 18 – 24 make up 70 percent of State College’s population. Indeed, a large portion of CATA’s ridership derives from students at The Pennsylvania State University, and most of CATA’s 19 routes serve the PSU campus.
But in Sudbury, college-age adults are less than seven percent of the population. None of Sudbury’s colleges have enrollments anywhere near that of Penn State. Only 4 of GOVA’s 25 routes serve Sudbury’s three undergraduate institutions. Nonetheless, GOVA runs 25 routes, many with 15-minute headways, in an urban area with 92,000 residents. Why would they do this?
Here’s a clue: it’s the economy. We know that university students in the U.S. are cash-strapped, with limited earned income during their college careers (thus skewing standard poverty metrics in many collegiate cities), but what about economically-based transit demand in Canadian cities?
A Quick Lesson in Transit and Economics
After spending more time with Statistics Canada’s census and economic data than is rational for any non-Canadian, I found the glimmer of an answer. While Sudbury has pockets of poverty, and also has several thousand low- and no-income college students, it’s a pretty prosperous place. Poverty rates are low, as are unemployment rates, and workforce participation rates are high. In fact, workforce needs are so great that Sudbury actively seeks job-ready immigrants from other countries.
But here’s the economic rub that shows what many Canadians have in common with U.S. college students. On average, costs of living – including housing, food, transportation, out-of-pocket healthcare expenses, even taxes – are nearly equal between the US and Canada, once you adjust for currency exchange rates, among other factors. However, average wages and salaries in Canada, including those in professional and other “middle class” jobs, are about 75 percent of what comparable jobs pay in the U.S., after adjusting for exchange rates. That’s a noticeable bite out of the cash needed to support a household’s middle-class lifestyle in Sudbury and other Canadian cities.
Middle-class Canadians may be happier, healthier and longer-lived than their U.S. counterparts, but they sometimes are a bit cash-conscious in their lifestyles, rather like middle-class U.S. college students.
Cash-consciousness among middle-class Canadians likely plays a role in shaping these data points:
Across Canada, 16 percent of households do not own an automobile or other personal vehicle, compared to around eight percent of US households being car-free. The statistical correlation between lacking a vehicle and living in poverty is pretty strong in the U.S., but not nearly as strong in Canada. Despite lower rates of car ownership, the percentage of Canadians in the workforce is higher than the percentage of workforce participation here in the U.S. That combination leads to the share of Canadians using transit as their primary means of commuting to work being more than 12 percent, while fewer than four percent of U.S. workers use public transit to get to their jobs.
What These Numbers Tell Us About Transit and Great Communities
That’s more information on Canadian economics and demographics than you probably wanted to know, but it provides a two-part answer to what we’ve been seeking:
First, a great community is one with transit that’s robust enough to make a middle-class lifestyle available for as many residents as possible.
Furthermore, a great community’s transit is embraced by its leaders as an effective tool for making a middle-class lifestyle achievable.
In our next chapter, we’ll hop on a few station platforms and discuss whether great transit runs on rails. You probably can guess the answer, but the ride will be an interesting one.
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.