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Are you really putting Atlanta on that list? I'm not sure if you realize it, but we do have a 48-mile heavy rail system with 4 lines that transports 227,000 riders per day along with a bus system that has 200,000 riders per day...and a streetcar that is just ready to open the first of several planned lines. Atlanta is ranked pretty high among U.S. rail systems.
And US rail systems are sub-par compared to other countries. Atlanta has a rail system that just sucks less.
Probably Las Vegas really only has that monorail which only serves tourists. The interesting thing is Las Vegas ALSO has one of the lowest freeway lane miles per capita in the country so its a lack of highways too but traffic there never seems to be too bad at least not during my visits and I've visited a lot of the area beyond the Strip.
I don't know if Salt Lake City's metro area has a population over 1 million. Baltimore has mass transit and wants to expand it but the problem is hardly anyone takes the Metro or Light Rail because of crime issues and most of the region is car centered
I never said it was "rapidly" improving. I said it was improving. Period.
For a city the size of gigantic Los Angeles, it should have a transit system MUCH better than what it is. I'm holding to that.
You can hold to whatever you want, but the fact of the matter is that Los Angeles does not belong on any list that relates to this thread topic. Your opinion just doesn't jive with the current realities of LA's public transit systems (Expo Line Extension, Gold Line Extension, Purple Line Extension, Measure R, 30/10 Initiative, etc.)
There are objective data (i.e. miles of track, number of lines, ridership, etc.) out there for you to utilize and compare and contrast.
Just because it 'should' be much better doesn't mean it's not good now. Could it be better? Yes. Seems like you're penalizing LA on what should be instead of what is. Right now LA is already a top ten city when it comes to mass transit, and it will only get better (rapidly).
Yeah, just the fact that Miami's airport is connected by rapid rail to downtown (and soon to be connected to commuter rail as well) - which is an amenity not many US cities have -- disqualifies Miami from consideration for this thread.
If they build a rail link between Downtown and South Beach (which I understand is currently under consideration) it would take Miami to another level.
How about Oklahoma City? Indianapolis? Raleigh, NC [not sure]? Birmingham, Alabama? Jacksonville, Florida? All of these are all low density and rather decentralized, and the south in general tends to have lower public transit usage than other parts of the country. Oklahoma City has about half the bus service of a usual "newer" American metro (note rail is excluded, except many cities in the graph either no rail or very little):
From the link, annual ridership is 8 million riders / year. Nassau County, NY has 29 million annual riders for its county bus system with a similar population. Salt Lake City, a slightly smaller metropiltan area, has 44 million riders bus and rail (not a fair comparison with Nassau County as Nassau has the LIRR). Las Vegas has 60 million riders / year, with a BRT system, though a population of 2 million rather than Oklahama City's 1.3 million. There is no reason why Las Vegas belongs on this discussion. From what I've read, its coverage is good but the speed can be very slow. At the higher end, Honolulu's bus system has 74 million bus riders / year, with only about 800,000 people in the region.
Indianopolis is worse from a per capita point of view: 10 million annual riders with a metro population of 1.9 million. Some old centralized cities (such as Buffalo) might have low transit ridership overall but good service in the central parts where transit is the most useful, so those cities shouldn't be among the worst. In any case, metro-wide, Buffalo has about half the transit ridership of Salt Lake City with the same population, but far better than Oklahoma City and Indianapolis.
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Originally Posted by nei
Why would you use rail lines only to judge a transit system? Rail lines often don't cover much of the city, and take a minority of the trips.
True. Seattle for years has had an efficient and dependable transit system without having heavy rail.
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