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by mdkras 4337 days ago
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.
2 comments
erjiang 4337 days ago
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.

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adestefan 4337 days ago
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.
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namocat 4337 days ago
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.
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kasey_junk 4337 days ago
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).
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