Having lived in Boston, SF, Seattle, and now NYC (and having visited LA on numerous occasions), not at all surprised to see this. Even considering the population differences, NYC wins by a large margin if the goal is 'best public transportation', and by proxy 'best metro area for commuters'.
NYC has (by far) the best public transportation system in the US. Nothing even comes close, though obviously MTA is not perfect. The BART stops running at midnight and doesn't go everywhere, the T is basically an east coast version of the BART, and King County Metro is just a shit show in general.
Granted, NYC obviously has the population to support such a great transportation system. But I wonder if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: NYC public transit is good, and so more people are willing to live in the metro area and commute. Commuting from Westport, CT to NYC daily isn't a huge deal. Commuting from Brentwood to SF every day would be a nightmare.
The trains are only one part of the puzzle. Where I live in Brooklyn I can walk 15 minutes to two different subway lines (DR!), but I can also bike entirely, take the ferry to two different stops that then either travel on a third subway line or let me bike share the remaining 15 blocks, drive to work in an emergency via 2 different bridges or a tunnel, or take the local car service either entirely on the same route (or Uber taxi) or half way to a fourth subway line. Amazingly all of these combinations result in the same 35 minute door to desk commute. The redundancy in the face of bad weather or emergencies is what really pays off in the end when you must get to work. If you live on a far away train line you do have public transportation, but way fewer options if something happens to take out the train (failure, snow, flooding, etc.)
> and King County Metro is just a shit show in general.
Ah, yes, I was wondering if I was going to read this here. In the same sentence that you give BART a pass for stopping at midnight and not going "everywhere," Metro gets written off completely. Even thought it has a 5am to 1am span of service, 14 night owl routes, daily express service from as far out as North (freakin') Bend, and is the most-used mode of transportation to jobs in Seattle, it's a "shit show."
Sorry, any public transport system that relies on buses as the backbone will be a "shit show". Buses are uncomfortable, slow, unreliable, get stuck in traffic, etc etc. "Bus rapid transit", dedicated lanes and so on ease the pain a bit, but at the end of day, they just can't compete with any service that has fully dedicated right of way.
Unless you've dug a subway, how do you get people to the rail lines? Park and rides? All that does is encourage suburban sprawl to drive to a rail station.
There's no reason for buses to be uncomfortable and unreliable beyond popular perception. I've ridden trains in Dallas that have worse onboard conditions than bus routes in Seattle.
You do what everybody outside the US does: build housing within easy walking/cycling distance of the stations.
And it's a simple matter of right of way, not "popular perception". A train runs on its own tracks, so it can be scheduled to the second and stops only when needed. A bus shares the road with other traffic, and is thus subject to traffic jams, traffic lights, other cars driving crazily and breaking down, nutcases running across the road and so on, which means lots of unnecessary stop-and-go (compared to a train) and a chronic inability to stick to a schedule.
Yes. There are still many places the subway doesn't go. The buses are also crowded, and sometimes you have to wait in line for a couple of hours even to get on (especially to/from the suburbs). Of course, you might have to wait for 30 minutes to get on the subway during rush hour (e.g. finding enough space to fit in to an open car).
My only point here is that everything is quite relative (i.e. first world vs. third world problems).
As for bus rapid transit, I found the new West Seattle service to be quite fast and efficient (although West Seattle was already pretty accessible before).
Unless it's changed DRASTICALLY in the last couple years, yes it's a shit show.
I would frequently walk home from Fremont to Ravenna because it was 2 AM and there was no way to get home aside from getting in a cab (and good luck competing with the million other people trying to get a cab that time of night), or waiting maybe an hour for a bus to maybe come by when it was supposed to. At least in SF there was no illusion of public transportation to get me anywhere very far after midnight.
As to why it's a "shit show" as compared to other cities, Metro is constantly in limbo and notoriously unreliable. Didn't they just cut a bunch of routes because of budget shortfalls? http://metro.kingcounty.gov/am/future/service-cuts.html
EDIT: The whole reason OBA is/was even remotely popular is because of how notoriously unreliable buses are in Seattle.
They cut some low-hanging fruit (and route 47) because of a budget shortfall, yes. But if you read the same link you posted, you'll see that the remainder of the cuts have been dropped. Seattle is even holding a vote in November to buy service for expansion.
As for being notoriously unreliable, I suppose we'll have to chalk it up to different circumstances. I've regularly commuted from Lake City and the CD to the Eastside for years, even during off-peak hours when there aren't any one-seat expresses, and have been late maybe twice. Metro's collection of buses seems to work great for me.
They cut 20+ regular routes. Even if they're "low-hanging fruit", that's a lot.
> Seattle is even holding a vote in November to buy service for expansion.
I wish for the best. Seriously. I think Metro is doomed to live in a constant state of limbo, where only serious service cuts will spur Seattleites to do anything about it. I think it's a greatly under-appreciated service in the city.
> As for being notoriously unreliable, I suppose we'll have to chalk it up to different circumstances.
That's fine, but again, OBA serves as solid proof that I'm not the only one who was frustrated by Metro's unreliability (otherwise timetables would be perfectly adequate).
EDIT: This has gotten off-track. Even if you disagree about how bad it is, Seattle public transit absolutely pales in comparison to NYC's public transportation system. I don't think that's really up for debate, and anyone suggesting otherwise I posit is delusional.
"best public transporation" for New York City? Bah. I categorically reject the notion that any city which has the longest commute times in the entire country as having a good transportation system [1].
I had a friend who was born and raised in the New York City area. I couldn't tell you what borough specifically. He was used to that insane commute. Wake up early, ride the train(s) for 90 minutes, work, ride them for 90 minutes home, have dinner, and go to bed. This is what he considered normal. When he moved to a city that doesn't have a broken transportation system and his daily commute time went from 3 hours to 30 mintues he said "Wow. So this is what it's like to be alive! I didn't realize this is what being an actual person was like".
> I categorically reject the notion that any city which has the longest commute times in the entire country as having a good transportation system
By how much? What's the variance like compared to other cities? Are we comparing NYC commute times to cities that don't have public transportation systems used en masse? If I live in Houston and drive 15 minutes to work, is it really fair to compare it to spending 30 minutes on a subway?
"Average commute time" isn't extremely relevant if we're including cities where most people don't commute by public transportation, given the subject of the article.
> I had a friend who was born and raised in the New York City area...
I spend 15 minutes commuting to work each day in NYC, compared to 45 when I was in SF. Based on that fact, I can conclusively say that SF's transportation system is 3x worse than NYC's based on my personal anecdote.
...what? It's highly objective that New York has the worst commute times in the country. I shared one link on it. There are countless more. Here's another that has more numbers for other cities. http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-and-worst//longest... If you object to their methodology
31.5% of NYC workers have a commute time longer than 60 minutes. That's insane.
While NYC definitely has nice public transit coverage, parts of the city are kind of a mess (cough cough G train cough cough). Hell, even travelling from Astoria to upper Manhattan can be a mess, or crosstown, or whatever. I def had a shorter commute from San Jose to Mountain View than I did within NYC. That said, if you are wealthy enough to live in Manhattan or off one of the nice train lines in Brooklyn, life can be pretty good.
I question if you can spend 90 min on a train in New York. It's only like 50 min to Connecticut on the metro north.
Also, my commute these days is about an hour and 20 min each way. 45 min Amtrak, 20 min walking, 15 min metro. Way preferable to a 30-40 min car commute.
Ya dude but Metro North isn't making tons of stops. East New York to the Bronx Zoo is def approaching two hours, kinda long for a weekend outing with the family. Factor in time spent waiting for a train, walking to the train, etc, and the number gets higher.
The methodology is described here: http://www.cts.umn.edu/Publications/ResearchReports/reportde.... They calculated the number of jobs that a random worker (assuming everyone lives in the centroid of the Census block he resides in) can get to by transit at every 10 minute threshold, multiplied by an exponential penalty with time constant 12.5 minutes. The metropolitan areas are ranked by this score. This basically says how many jobs that you can catch the bus to, given that you reside somewhere in the metro area.
This analysis is more sophisticated than WalkScore’s Transit Score; this analysis uses OpenTripPlanner to simulate trips rather than just counting the number of bus lines near a given location.
There are many related questions that are not directly answered by this report, but I think on the top of everyone’s mind is: How many apartments can you afford in commute distance from a random job? I’m guessing San Francisco would no longer rank near the top anymore. To determine whether the transit system is good enough for car-free living, one would also want a score that takes into account trips to other destinations such as bars and grocery stores.
It's unfortunate that these are (or at least appear to me to be) raw counts, rather than percentages, normalized by each metro area's population or job totals.
Keep in mind that in many places, and in particular in the Bay Area, the entire notion of trying to create short commutes from work to home as an ideal is one that lots of cities still haven't wrapped their head around.
I live in Palo Alto and I've heard people tell the City Council that no one wants to take public transportation and therefore we don't need it. I've also heard people scoff at the idea that jobs and housing should be built next to each other to avoid long commutes, emissions, lost time, sprawl, etc. Anyone here who says we need more housing next to all our huge office parks gets called "entitled."
We're facing a paradigm shift wherein younger generations want to be able to have the option of taking public transportation. They want to live in lively neighborhoods where friends and spaces for hanging out are close at hand- a trip to the local coffee shop doesn't involve getting in your car and driving to a strip mall. But, people who grew up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s grew up with the notion of the car as freedom and a house in suburbia as the definition of success. To them, quality of life is all about how fast they can drive somewhere and how easily they can park there. When they think "urban" they think "ghetto."
These attitudes contribute to the NIMBYism all over the Bay Area and they're the reason why outside of SF, it's extremely hard to get around without a car. It's the reason why despite being the center of innovation on the planet, Silicon Valley still looks like a Leave It To Beaver throwback.
I've been to most of the big cities in the U.S. and despite having some problems the D.C. (the city proper) system is easily the 2nd best public transport. It's no NYC, but it's not bad. By wider extension, the links into the Maryland and Virginia systems are also pretty good. Looking at the map it's not even clear to me why it's ranked below LA or SF. It provides lots of coverage and covers a vast area.
Then I realized they were measuring time as part of their ranking and yeah, I guess I can see that. The D.C. metro area is larger than all of L.A. county and it can take forever to get around it.
It's not NYC, and it's not Chicago or Philly either. DC suffers for making the Metro do double duty as a subway and commuter rail. Plus, many of the suburban stops have awful walk ability (silver line)
Yeah, you're right, outside of the city proper (and the very nearby surrounding areas like Arlington and Silver Spring) the walkability is terrible. We'll see if it improves, the model of "stick a station out in the suburbs and build huge parking garages" is not one that I like. Ideally the areas right around the stations should be high density, very walkable, mixed residential-shopping-office.
Using the subway system as a commuter rail line means that it can take something like an hour or more to make it from an endpoint station to the city.
Plus D.C. has two actual commuter rail systems (VRE for Virginia and MARC for Maryland) plus Amtrak.
The fantastic transit in NYC, along with a very large population, makes for significantly increased labor market liquidity.
As in any market, increased liquidity translates to reduced risk. For this reason I think that within 5-10 years NYC will overtake SF / Bay Area as the optimal startup economy/environment in the US.
NYC isn't there yet, but there are so many intrinsic advantages it's just a matter of time. The biggest impediment is cultural. Most of the tech talent is very cautious and by the book. However this is changing. NYC Papers We Love is a great example of what the future holds... As is clojure.
NYC will get there when they move the city to the west coast. There is something different about the west: wide open spaces, mountains, good weather, that you can't really replicate in the east.
The New York night life cannot be beaten in the US for many reasons.
The sheer volume of people also means that people have a good chance of having good ties to NYC even when never having lived there. Love the weather out here in the Bay Area, but there is a part of me that will always miss NYC and the whole tri-state area (well, minus Long Island anyhow ;) ) - hell, the whole east coast in general.
Many are either east coast persons or west coast persons. I know many easterners who hate living on the west coast, and vice versa. The question should really be: are many techies living on the west coast willing to become east coasters? I know many aren't native west coasters, but I still think a lot of them just like living on the west coast.
It would be nice to see jobs sliceable by median salary or industry or something like that. The part of Austin I live in is, according to the map, home to thousands of walkable jobs, but I guarantee you virtually none of them are information economy jobs.
One thing that this report didn't really take into account is the ratio of car travel time to metro travel time. Sure, you can get to most places in San Jose on the VTA in under 2 hours, but you can also drive there in under 30 minutes.
I wish they had included Toronto. There's an ongoing debate about how to improve transit and being able to see various options compared against each other empirically would be damn useful.
As a philanthropic effort an open system that would allow someone to "play" with transit designs might be a godsend for all urban planners. Add in the ability to easily adjust schedules/stops (e.g. bus every 4 minutes, or add a stop between X and Y), easily add routes (more buses, streetcars, light rail, subway) and compare multiple configurations would be pretty kick ass.
Oh and all this in real time with instant updating ;)
Looks like he'd primarily need replacements for U.S. Census TIGER 2010 datasets: blocks, core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) and the U.S. Census Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) 2011 Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES)
For the specific Census data... all I can do is point to http://www.statcan.gc.ca/start-debut-eng.html, the top level of Stats Canada. I tried to find similar datasets but wasn't even close to successful. CANSIM seems to be the bit where you can download the "raw" data... but finding the right CANSIM table(s) appears to be more difficult than I expected.
Ohh... quick thought you might want to pass on. This study is great for transit access to work... but what about access to parks/recreation and maybe entertainment (this could be tricky because parks are free but entertainment can be anywhere from cheap to expensive). Sort of the other half of the work/life balance.
As a Toronto resident I would say that the city could use some better planning and zoning. A bunch of high density like Liberty Village, Eglinton west and Flemington Park are served by buses and streetcars (streetcars!) whereas large segments of subway go through low density suburbia-like areas, and zoning laws make it hard to build anything there.
It's hit or miss in Los Angeles. You have to live in a specific area that has a transit hub and then work near a connected transit hub for it to be feasible. For example, you could live in San Fernando Valley and commute to Downtown LA (Orange Line bus to Red Line subway), or Santa Monica and Downtown LA very easily (freeway bus), but San Fernando Valley to Santa Monica is impossible to do without going to Downtown LA first (a 2-4 hour commute each way). In heavy traffic those drives are 45 min to 1 hour max.
NYC has (by far) the best public transportation system in the US. Nothing even comes close, though obviously MTA is not perfect. The BART stops running at midnight and doesn't go everywhere, the T is basically an east coast version of the BART, and King County Metro is just a shit show in general.
Granted, NYC obviously has the population to support such a great transportation system. But I wonder if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: NYC public transit is good, and so more people are willing to live in the metro area and commute. Commuting from Westport, CT to NYC daily isn't a huge deal. Commuting from Brentwood to SF every day would be a nightmare.