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I agree overall population is irrelevant. Chicago has a daily transit ridership of 2.1 million (weekday; hard to find weekend numbers) but it's larger than either Toronto or Montreal.
Australia and Canada are autocentric, but less so than the US. All major Australian and Canadian cities have efficient public transit, even sprawling Calgary and Edmonton have LRT systems with higher daily ridership than any American LRT system, including the LRT of serious cities like Portland, LA, San Francisco etc...
The only countries I'd say are similar or more autocentric are some of the gulf states. So Kuwait, UAE, Oman. Dubai has a ridiculously huge subway, but in general they're very low density and very autocentric.
US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are the kings of auto dependence. But yeah, i'd say we win by a goodly amount. Still, in Toronto 70% of people commute by automobile... that higher than many American cities like NY, DC, Boston, Chicago, Philly, San Francisco. It's about even with Seattle or Baltimore which is better than most. Just because you have access to transit doesn't mean you use it.
I don't think it has much to do with the overall population. The percent of people living in cities above x population is probably pretty comparable too. Are there any US cities with higher transit ridership than Montreal and Toronto outside of NYC for instance? Both have above 2.5 million daily ridership.
Do you have exact numbers of these? I suspect both of these as a fraction of urban area population might be similar to NYC and higher than any other American city.
NYC: Total Ridership: 10 million (or 13 million; two sources conflict depends if multiple lines count as separate trips I think); urban area population 18.7 million
Chicago: Total Ridership 2.1 million; urban area population 8.3 million
Washington: Total Ridership 1.4 million; urban area population 3.9 million
Boston: Total Ridership 1.3 million; urban area population 4.0 million
Philadelphia and San Francisco might have a similar fraction but other US cities are much lower.
Do you have exact numbers of these? I suspect both of these as a fraction of urban area population might be similar to NYC and higher than any other American city.
NYC: Total Ridership: 10 million (or 13 million; two sources conflict depends if multiple lines count as separate trips I think); urban area population 18.7 million
Chicago: Total Ridership 2.1 million; urban area population 8.3 million
Washington: Total Ridership 1.4 million; urban area population 3.9 million
Boston: Total Ridership 1.3 million; urban area population 4.0 million
Philadelphia and San Francisco might have a similar fraction but other US cities are much lower.
So less than half of NY's ridership although the boundaries of Toronto's transit and the MTA is debatable. The NYC part of MTA gets around 7 million daily riders.
Wikipedia says the ridership is 2.59 million for 2011, where's the 2.26 million from?
Anyways, that's just for the Toronto Transit Commission, which is the bulk of it, but doesn't really serve the suburbs.
You can add:
217,000 for GO Transit, which is regional commuter bus/rail serving mostly the suburbs but also a few areas outside the urban area
108,350 for MiWay, which serves the suburb of Mississauga
75,000 roughly for York Region Transit, I don't think they post weekday ridership, but annual ridership is 18,613,403, and the ratio of weekday to annual ridership for Brampton Transit is 1:247, so I estimated YRT's from that. YRT serves the Northern suburbs.
66,000 for Brampton Transit, which serves the suburb of Brampton.
And then there's a few smaller ones
~35,000 for Durham Transit, which serves the Eastern suburbs as well as the Oshawa MSA, which while technically a separate MSA according to statistics Canada, is still very connected to Toronto and only separated by a narrow strip of farmland in terms of urban areas. It's also considered part of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA).
10-15,000 for Oakville Transit, a Western suburb
~10,000 for Burlington Transit, technically Burlington is considered to be part of Hamilton's MSA, but it's still very connected to Toronto and considered part of the GTA while Hamilton is not.
Total is around 3,115,000 weekday ridership for the GTA which is 6,054,191 people (2011 census). The smaller urban area of 5,132,794 people would exclude Burlington and Oshawa, plus some of the GO Transit numbers for about 3,000,000 weekday ridership. It's hard to say exactly because GO Transit serves places outside even the GTA, and Durham Transit serves areas both inside (Ajax, Pickering) and outside (Oshawa MSA) the urban area.
To that you can add
139,000 for the Reseau de Transport de Longueuil, which serves the suburb of Longueuil and other South Shore suburbs
72,000 for Agence Metropolitaine the Transport (commuter rail and bus)
55,000 for the Societe de Transport de Laval, which serves the suburb of Laval
And a few thousand more for the small suburban transit systems for a total of about 2,800,000 for an urban area of 3,317,000.
Some smaller cities fare pretty well too. Ottawa's transit system has a ridership of 535,000 (according to wikipedia) serving a population of 883,000, which if true is even better than Toronto percentage wise and more in total ridership than many larger cities including Portland, Seattle, Baltimore and Miami. Edmonton, Calgary, Victoria and Vancouver also have pretty good transit usage relative to their populations.
If their numbers are accurate, it suggests US cities have the lowest transit usage, followed by Australia, followed closely by Canada and then the UK has much higher transit usage.
I last saw the TTC putting in subway ads and in on the ad there were stats and claiming that Toronto's transit system uses the least out of taxpayers' money than any other transit system in all of North America (can't remember the number of how many dollars/cents per person though).
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