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Comment by droopyEyelids | Hacker News Reader

Seemed like he stopped at a visualization of the data, without any real interpretation.

I'd like to see some information on the density of the areas. For example, Chicago is listed as the metro region (8 million people) when the city itself only has about 3 million, and public transport hardly exists outside the city.

If the total rides had been divided by the city population, it would equal much closer to 200 rides per capita.

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Good point - I found this a confusing analysis without digging much into what it was saying - Urbana and Athens were high on the list...why? Do they have public bus systems that students use extensively? If so, that would tend to give a false impression of how much public transit is used there. I liked that he later pulled apart the small and large cities, but it would have been nice to understand what the data was saying in the context of the cities it examined.

Your point on Chicago is well taken - I was surprised to see SF/Oak ahead of it, as they "feel" harder to navigate with transit only, but I was forgetting that the suburbs are included in Chicago, which is basically impossible once you leave the city limits.

Yeah, I was very surprised to see Athens, GA in the top 5. I was not even aware that they had a substantial public transit system and I lived in GA for ~15 years.

You are probably mentally discounting bus infrastructure. Busses are much more prevalent than people think but their demographic skews much lower on the economic scale than other transit options (often because they are abysmally slow).

Yes, college towns often have great public transit usage because students ride for free, the school pays the local agency or runs their own vehicles, and you have a lot of young people without cars.

Ann Arbor, MI (#20) is a great example where University of Michigan runs a fleet of buses that puts many small cities' systems to shame. Lafayette, IN (#30) is partially supported by serving Purdue University. Bloomington, IN (#40) has two bus systems - the city's, and Indiana University's. (Disclaimer: these are all customers of DoubleMap.)

Not sure why you think it would be a false impression - public transit is used a lot in college towns.

State College, PA is where Penn State University is located. Even if you drive to the university as a student you still need to take a bus to get to class. That makes around 45,000 students using public transportation everyday.

Well, it's not clear if the ride count includes metra. If it does, then you need to include the entire metro area. If it's CTA only, then it should be just the city.

CTA does actually service parts of the metro area outside of the city such as Evanston & Oak Park.

In general, I do wish more people would explicitly say whether they're listing city population or metro population. In this case the numbers are all clearly metro area. It would be interesting to see how the rankings differed for just the cities. I imagine they'd be very similar, but a few cities would move around.

In many cases I think you'd want a third number, something like the core urbanized area. Metro area is too big, but in some cases city limits are either too big or too small for historical/political reasons. For example Houston includes many of its suburbs, because Texas law is very annexation-friendly. Whereas parts of the urban core of Boston are legally in Brookline and Cambridge, and part of the legal core of Copenhagen is legally in Frederiksberg, but for transit purposes those distinctions aren't that important (Brookline/Cambridge are still part of the "T", and Frederiksberg has a line of the Copenhagen Metro).

Public transportation outside the city of Chicago (PACE + METRA + northern and western L extensions) is part of a unified system with Chicago, and is huge, heavily used, and critical (as opposed to hardly existing.)

However, most people out there own cars. Metra is very infrequent outside of commuting hours, and seems to be mostly used as a way for car owners who live in the suburbs to avoid freeway congestion and parking costs downtown, rather than a complete car replacement.

In urban neighborhoods on the red and blue lines, for example, car ownership is basically superfluous.

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