Los Angeles Metro surpasses Bay Area in per capita transit ridership
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The thread is titled "transit ridership," not "train ridership." Buses clearly count. And Riverside is basically San Jose.
The OP article is based off a San Jose Mercury news article comparing L.A. county with the Bay Area.
The article looks like it is including subordinate agencies like Big Blue Bus. Its a bit confusing because the region "LA Metro" would include Orange County, while the transit agency "LA Metro" would not, so it sounds like all transit operating in Los Angeles County vs. the entire Bay Area.
The fact that there is now a BART connection to San Jose makes a Riverside analogy very difficult as they only have a Metrolink connection, which is a regional train that goes as far as San Diego county.
"Often packed",not constantly, and I do not reside there so I can't know everything. However, I did ride metro buses during the pandemic when fares were not collected (presumably to help isolate the driver), there were plenty of people riding then. Of course, like everywhere, this is certain routes at certain times.
What I meant to say that when confronted with the fact that Los Angeles has the #2 bus system in the nation, that information will not influence the opinion of the average American who likely still believes there is minimal to no mass transit in the area.
The APTA data that was posted upthread to debunk the OP article still shows LA Metro bus with 3X the ridership of SFBA buses (in a metro less than 3X the size). It also shows LA having more than half the heavy rail ridership with a subway roughly 15% the size of BART.
Less than an hour ago I disembarked a light rail in San Diego that was standing room only for much of the trip, more than five miles outside of downtown.
It seems like whenever the wrong cities are posting transit gains, we're told it's a fluke, or the data is somehow "not useful" in determining who has a good system, etc. This seems like the latest example of that.
Correction to this, its more like just short of 2X ridership when Oakland, Santa Clara, Long Beach, and SaMo are all added in.
Maybe I'm not following the conversation. Were you not responding to this comment..
..when you responded in the next post?
I read nearly all of your comments as responding to Losfrisco who was certainly discussing trains.
I think the confusion comes from when I asked about "BART's operating area." Since city/metro/CSA are somewhat murky with the Bay Area, I carved out a region based off of BART to try to get an agency vs. agency area of operations breakdown.
Like you said, the two areas are executing different concepts, I think Metro compares best vs. Chicago CTA with spacing and coverage area.
Maybe I'm not following the conversation. Were you not responding to this comment..
..when you responded in the next post?
I read nearly all of your comments as responding to Losfrisco who was certainly discussing trains.
The conversation is getting pretty far from the thread title, which is about transit ridership, and appears to be very outdated. The SF area is on a much higher level at least in commute ridership, no matter how you slice it.
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Comparing the "Los Angeles metro area" to the "Bay Area" is wildly ambiguous and inconsistent overall. You either have to compare the MSA of LA to the MSA of SF, or take all of Los Angeles' CSA of 33,000 sq mil and compare per mile transit to all of SF's CSA if boundaries are being compared apples to apples. Lastly you could just compare systems and their coverage area by county, in all forms of transit.
What should be used to determine the "LA metro area" should just be the 10 million person LA County, and I suppose Orange County vs the 9 core counties of the Bay Area. Tally up the total population of each to determine the denominator of true ridership per mile stats. California and it's huge counties is nearly impossible to compare to anywhere else by "metro area" due to counties being the primary measuring stick.
Last edited by the resident09; 11-17-2023 at 05:58 AM..
The conversation is getting pretty far from the thread title, which is about transit ridership, and appears to be very outdated. The SF area is on a much higher level at least in commute ridership, no matter how you slice it.
As far as conversations go, I don't find this to be drifting very far. As with most things, someone may make a point and then it may require a deeper dive or may have a tangent. That's how conversations tend to work. It needn't be just an exchange of statistics and then it's over.
Comparing the "Los Angeles metro area" to the "Bay Area" is wildly ambiguous and inconsistent overall. You either have to compare the MSA of LA to the MSA of SF, or take all of Los Angeles' CSA of 33,000 sq mil and compare per mile transit to all of SF's CSA if boundaries are being compared apples to apples. Lastly you could just compare systems and their coverage area by county, in all forms of transit.
What should be used to determine the "LA metro area" should just be the 10 million person LA County, and I suppose Orange County vs the 9 core counties of the Bay Area. Tally up the total population of each to determine the denominator of true ridership per mile stats. California and it's huge counties is nearly impossible to compare to anywhere else by "metro area" due to counties being the primary measuring stick.
From what I can gather from the Planetizen article, they are using six county slice of the Bay with a population of around 6 million. Larger than the SF MSA, smaller than the SJ CSA.
I agree that the use of counties isn't ideal, I would use UA, because in both cases it captures where the primary transit systems are operating for the most part.
One thing I don't think can be denied is that the Bay Area is moving in the direction of being more functionally suburban when it comes to transit, while metro Los Angeles is going in the opposite direction.
Last edited by Losfrisco; 11-17-2023 at 07:44 PM..
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