Playing with Ridership Numbers

Jarrett Walker argues that reports of the decline of public transportation ridership have been exaggerated.

1 minute read

July 18, 2010, 9:00 AM PDT

By Tim Halbur


Jarrett writes that one of the main reasons the numbers are confused is that they lump together areas of low transit use and high transit use into "metropolitan areas".

"Metro areas, by definition, conflate a dense core city and a lot of low-density suburbs, and thus conceal the dramatic difference between transit's relevance in those places. Metro area statistics may be useful for judging the relative economic performance of different parts of a country, but they always conceal most of what matters in understanding how transit really works. If you want to understand how and why transit works and fails, you should spend less time comparing metro Los Angeles and metro New York and more time comparing Manhattan with Nassau County, or comparing the LA/Hollywood core with the western San Fernando Valley."

Friday, July 16, 2010 in Human Transit

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I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching. Mary G., Urban Planner

I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching.

Mary G., Urban Planner

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