One Person's Hierarchy of US Transit Systems

 

Earlier this month on social I saw and then tried to contribute to a discussion about best cities in the US for transit. My angle was to think about where, by culture and infrastructure, transit use was or was not normalized in one’s day-to-day living. This yielded my opinion of how cities with transit sort by tier, and after hearing some really interesting feedback, I want to revisit that ranking in this post.

The top tier belongs solely to New York City, of course, which dwarfs the rest of the country in every facet of transit prominence: number of rides, how easy it is to do without a car, how intertwined riding transit is with the vibe of the city. I assume there is no argument here, except to say that my more well-traveled friends would say that there are so many cities around the world that have our best city beat by miles on this front. More on this later.

The next tier I assigned to Boston and DC, as places where transit infrastructure was dense in the urban core, and importantly the spokes that reached into other parts of the region really drove development to the point that you don’t have to live downtown in order to get away with not owning a car. But it seems clear Boston rates ahead of DC, which is, both by culture and usage, not nearly as transit-dominant as I wish it was. In my lifetime the system has been built out further, and yet for a variety of reasons a lot of people still drive a lot (and, on a related note, the pedestrian experience in many parts of the city leaves something to be desired, but that’s a subject of another post).

Below these are the remainder of the “Big Six,” which would be Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. These are cities with very well built out transit systems, such that no one would blink an eye if you never owned a car and getting around by transit doesn’t require a whole lot of advance planning. They fall short of Boston and DC because there are still some places in these cities where, by infrastructure and expectation, driving is the norm rather than transit. But you can absolutely feel good about these places if you are anti-car and pro-transit.

From here things fall off a ledge. I listed four cities in the next tier down – Baltimore, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle – but one can easily make a case to downgrade any of these cities or upgrade any of the ten I put in the final tier. These fourteen cities have transit systems such that you can get around and may not need to own a car, but those systems are a little too sparse in coverage and service to make it easy to navigate without having to commit to the planning and extra effort to see it through. Importantly, the culture in these cities is not transit-oriented and in some cases is so pervasively car-oriented that to ride transit at all, let alone regularly, may be met with mockery or suspicion. On a related note, there may be a class dynamic to this looking down upon transit riders, for oftentimes in these cities to ride transit is not a matter of choice but the economics of not being able to afford a car.

All told, that’s 20 US cities. Obviously there are other cities in the country that have transit, but only those where you’d have a puncher’s chance of relying on it on a regular basis. I’d venture to say there are many more cities in much smaller countries in Asia and Europe that have better service and more transit-oriented culture. In America, car is king, except in a depressingly small number of cities.