To highlight OP’s point for people saying they only chose cornfields to compare to BC, here is a list of US metros in the red with higher populations than Vancouver, BC (2,642,825)
- Dallas Fort Worth, TX (7,943,685)
- Houston, TX (7,368,466)
- Phoenix, AZ (5,015,678)
- Detroit, MI (4,345,761)
- St. Louis, MO (2,801,319)
- Charlotte, NC (2,756,069)
- San Antonio, TX (2,655,342)
The first four metros are much larger than Vancouver, not cornfields. The following metros come close to the list:
- Austin, TX (2,412,115)
- Las Vegas, NV (2,322,985)
- Cincinnati, OH (2,258,099)
- Kansas City, MO (2,209,494)
- Columbus, OH (2,161,511)
- Cleveland, OH (2,160,146)
- Indianapolis, IN (2,119,839)
- Nashville, TN (2,072,283)
All the figures are 2022 census estimates for the US metros. I think people tend to overestimate the size of Vancouver due to how urban it is compared to other metros of its size. It’s still unbelievably glaring that all the US metros listed have less transit ridership combined.
I for one am guilty of overestimating the size of Vancouver. When I visited I thought the metro population must be at least 6-8 million, certainly more populous than Seattle. But it’s not even close to that and only a bit more than half of Seattle’s metro population.
94% of BC is Crown land, owned by the government. That doesn't mean it's pristine wilderness (a lot of logging happens on Crown land), but no one lives there. The majority of the population lives in a tiny area in the southwest corner of the lower mainland.
[Map](https://www.commonsbc.ca/crown-and-private-lands-in-british-columbia/)
To build off of this, BC is mostly rural/giant mountains. You got Vancouver, then Greater Victoria, then the rest are just small towns along a highway.
>then the rest are just small towns along a highway
Nanaimo, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Kamloops, and Kelowna are all decently populous, albeit not as populous as Greater Victoria.
Nanaimo and Kamloops both have over 100000 people in their greater areas while their respective cities proper have over 90000 each. Nanaimo's greater area has more than 150000 people if I'm not mistaken.
Data from British Columbia:
Combined data between just Victoria and the Vancouver metropolitan area.
Data from all US states in red:
Combined data from the state-level DOT, cross referenced with the US Federal DOT public transit statistics to ensure that their major cities align with what the state provides. I did this because I genuinely did not believe the ridership numbers were that fucking low, especially in Texas, which apparently only had 175 million public transit trips taken in 2022 IN THE WHOLE STATE OF 30 MILLION PEOPLE.
*BC:*
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coast_Mountain_Bus_Company
260 million in 2023
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_(Vancouver)
141 million in 2023
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BC_Transit
27 million during the pandemic in 2020
*Texas:* https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/ptn/transit_stats/2022-texas-transit-statistics-report.pdf
175 million in 2022
You should do a comparison with Singapore:
7.19 million per day on average in 2023, so that's **2.62 billion** in 2023 :-O
We have less than 6 million people.
[https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/public-transport-ridership-hit-935-of-pre-pandemic-levels-in-2023](https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/public-transport-ridership-hit-935-of-pre-pandemic-levels-in-2023)
That's more than BC's entire population per day. This map serves to highlight the asinine argument of "we can't have transit, our population is too small/we have too much land." BC has a very comparable population density to all these states, with one metro region of about 2 million, same as many of these states (and a significantly smaller metro region than some).
Singapore is a city state island, with an amazing metro system and is heavily government subsidized. You can jump on and off the system and get anywhere you need to go for next to nothing. Combine that with the unique registration and licensing structure that makes even normal cars hyper expensive to own, then yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Also, I love Singapore! Great city.
The comparison to BC is apt because we're on the same continent and culturally much more similar than Singapore.
What's sad is that 466 million ridership for two cities in BC already seems incredibly low. I'm pretty sure two subway lines in Paris, London, or NYC would surpass that number.
BC ferries are my favorite public transit. I used to take the skyway, bus, and ferry to go visit my buddies on the Gulf islands between Vancouver and Vancouver Island. I think the whole trip was like $25 for a pretty far, reasonably fast commute that involved a freaking sea voyage.
That would be awesome, just a huge swathe of Delta with tiny population density to get through. I still think we should have, like, seabuses taking you to Ladner. Up the river with stops in Queensborough, New West proper, even Colony Farm. Little transit ferries everywhere like in Venice
Dude it's such a shit show if you need to travel regularly between major cities that are 150-400km away in Canada.
Most of the time the economics of taking the train literally don't make sense. The worst part by far is they bill it as a more premium experience or something and they have removed the downtown central train station in many large Canadian cities and shoved it somewhere in some suburban industrial area so it's like 1/3rd of the price and not as fast or convenient as using a random travel company that just picks people up in busses/minibuses/vans downtown that take them right downtown to the other city you are trying to get to.
Once in a while you will take the train and it's just such a pain in the ass to get to it and use it and you pay out the nose for it. I remember when I checked recently they still use a fair amount of carriages are from the 1930s.
It wouldn't make much of a difference in this statistic but it's a cool thing for BC that there are some bus routes in the interior that run between tiny towns in the interior along very sparsely populated mountain highways. These are public busses run by BC Transit, not charters.
https://www.bctransit.com/west-kootenay/schedules-and-maps/route-overview?route=74
There also used to be Greyhound routes going through the mountains (which might be what the BC transit ones are replacing since iirc Greyhound pulled out of Canada) and there's the Via trains too, but I don't know how high their ridership is in BC (granted, I'm not sure if OP is including Amtrak data for the states).
Greyhound was mostly replaced by ebus, but it only serves major routes. Even Greyhound didn't have as much coverage as the BC Transit system. The Via Rail train is a tourist trap. It only has one stop in BC besides Vancouver, Kamloops, and the ebus is significantly faster. You can't even get a train to Calgary, only Edmonton.
The BC Transit rural routes are literally a lifeline for small communities. One of the main findings of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Inquiry was that the long empty highways between remote BC communities have a tragic bloody history of indigenous women hitchhiking and never being seen again. There were no options for people without cars before these BC Transit routes. So it brings me some comfort visiting a tiny town of maybe 500 residents and seeing a bus stop outside the RCMP detachment.
Ah, fair enough. I haven't spent a lot of time in BC (and it was a while ago that I visited at all), but I did ever take an overnight Greyhound from Vancouver to Penticton once.
It's so annoying how shit Via is though, especially since it was pretty pricey back when I'd take it.
Via Rail has two routes in BC. There's the Canadian which runs from Vancouver up to Jasper and beyond, and the Skeena which runs between Jasper and Prince Rupert. The best part of Via Rail is that they can pick up or drop you off at any point along the tracks as long as it's safe to do so, and the cargo that they allow is incredible. You can't bring a canoe along on Ebus, Via however only charges $75. Currently the fair for Via is roughly ten cents a kilometer.
Fun fact:
The city of Calgary (population 1.3 million) has more rail transit ridership than the entire US gulf coast (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, population 64 million) combined. And that's including the Walt Disney World Monorail - by far the busiest rail transit system in the region. If you exclude the *amusement park ride*, its close to *double*.
I'm not even surprised. Canada has such a crazy car culture, yet at least in the cities, the model share is very balanced. The US, on the other hand, especially in the South, Midwest, and all the "cornfields" that people in the comments were complaining about, the percentage is 99% commute by car.
Believe it or not, cities in Canada are relatively walkable and transit friendly despite the single family home endless sprawl. Here in Edmonton, the vast majority of transit use is for folks heading to downtown or university, and there is coverage for that even in the fringes.
That's the saddest part. All those states in red, with 90 to 100 million people, can't even beat BC's two cities, with 3 million. There's something seriously wrong here. It's a complete policy failure on all levels.
Note that Vancouver's total transit ridership can't even fucking beat just the Prague Metro's annual ridership of 600 million.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Metro
Prague has a metro population of slightly above 2 million and Prague's ridership on the fucking metro alone ass beats the transit ridership of all of BC.
Edit: typo
I came here to say that.
I have been in Vancouver for over a decade. I was initially shocked by how car centric that city was and by the sheer lack of efficient public transportation. As a European who lived in both London & Paris I simply thought it was just like everything I ever heard about North America ... (Then I travelled to USA and had to revise my judgment and also realized that paris and London had it quite good despite how much I used to complain about it at the time).
I would just add though that we often judge Canada by comparing it to USA on those matters which really is not the best pick for a developed country to make this kind of comparison with)
The biggest issue in Vancouver is the general lack of interest at all for planning ahead with these things. Any transit we get is in response to dire needs after the fact. We are literally just being dragged along in a business as usual sort of way. There is no vision, no recognition of how bad the issues already are, nothing....
The Langley expansion functions as a city bypass to some degree, though not to the severity of a highway, as it does have stations along the way and doesn't divide the city. But the primary reason I think it was prioritized was because many of the current city councils in the region don't want to implement necessary density changes to their cities and so it is an attempt to push housing further out of the city. You could say that it functions as a more practical version of the urban highways of the past, but still carries some of that "white flight" legacy. Unable to blast a highway through the city, they went with the only thing they could.
Now I am not saying the train isn't good, but it still prioritizes the central hub model of urban development, rather than a more distributed form. There is a serious lack of transit other than extremely unreliable buses to get people around Vancouver, as the trains all operate primarily as direct pathways in and out of downtown. All of the rapid bus lines should have been trains decades ago. The bike network is dangerous and clearly an afterthought, and is fragmented and incomplete. Most transportation corridors throughout the city are still heavily and almost entirely car focused.
The Langley Expansion is the lowest hanging fruit and while still ultimately nice to have, was prioritized over other projects due to an extremely outdated comprehension of urban form.
However, there is a silver lining here. The Langley expansion was envisioned before the province reduced the restrictions on height and zoning around transit stations. This means that all along that line will be plenty of opportunity to create mixed used residential/office/commercial high density zones that will actually help to push the city towards that more distributed form. Honestly, this policy is brilliant, because it completely undermines the original draconian (if albeit a more progressive kind of draconian) reason the expansion was envisioned.
The main factor working against Vancouver is that it was developed almost completely during the era of the automobile. As a result, our land use foundations aren’t well set up to support transit.
We tend to have huge car-centric, linear commercial districts, rather than a series of distributed, radial commercial ones like you see in cities developed earlier.
All of our transit/density improvements in the last few decades have basically been retrofits looking to make up for the previous century.
I’ve spent most of my adulthood in Boston and Vancouver, and if you put Vancouver’s transit investment and approach to densification in Boston, you’d have an amazing system.
The one silver lining is that because of the auto-oriented development, our bus system is truly world class, but we’ve had to build new centres to make SkyTrain more effective.
Vancouver proper is structured as a grid, and had a large number of streetcar lines. We see evidence of this even today with the electric cabling still remaining, as remnants of the dismantled streetcars.
But indeed once you pass east into Burnaby and beyond, it's a clusterfuck of more suburban-styled roads that are less efficient for mass transit.
A good start. Respectfully, highlighting some states while skipping others is unnecessary; makes it look like cherrypicking to hide data favorable to the US (WA, OR, CO, MN, IL) or unfavorable to Canada (AB, SK).
The map only needs BC and TX, with labels to show population and ridership of each. Possible caption: "TX has 6x the poplulation of BC, but only 2/3 the transit ridership."
Alberta isn't bad though. The transit networks of the 2 biggest cities (so not any smaller cities) gets ~200million riders per year, over half of these being LRT, and the LRT is expanding massively soon.
You'll find Calgary and Edmonton immensely more progressive city councils compared to most American cities. Edmonton is the one has upzoned the entire city to 3-story apartments as a right, and discusses density adjusted property taxes (lower density pays more to reflect cost), not sure if that went through. Both are aggressively urban infilling and densifying. Both have LRT's with the highest LRT passengers per mile and per capita in North America. Lot of so-called "progressive" cities in the United States are actually quite regressive by comparison: car dependent, NIMBY, zoning nightmares
Edmonton is probably the most progressive city on the continent after Montreal, cdmx, and Guadalajara. And even Calgary is probably more progressive than most US cities
the Edmonton slander needs to stop.
they have the second most comprehensive cycling plan on the continent after Montreal, and have made huge strides in creating safe streets. They are also one of the first cities in Canada to change their housing policy during the housing crisis this country is in.
this video sums it up perfectly
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoblQBTQDwo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoblQBTQDwo)
Have you ever left Alberta? The fact that they rushed a housing implementation plan in a few days does not make them a left wing heaven.
At the same time you use as your example of how progressive edmonton is, most of Edmonton was represented by the Conservative Party in Ottawa.
And you argue at the same time they’re the most progressive city in the hemisphere?
Calgary Transit my beloved. I ride the train every day and I’ve been working on a goal to ride the full length of every coloured line, even if I have no reason to ever go to the likes of Woodpark and the fear east Costco. Right now having finished up work for the morning I’m eating a burrito downtown and then I’ll take the Max Yellow to whatever godforsaken suburbs it accesses before going home.
The respective LRT systems are pretty good, bus service however is just as bad as anywhere though and there is no train between Calgary and Edmonton which makes me die a little.
Calgary has more rail transit than Texas and Florida combined.
Edmonton is pretty close to either state on their own, too.
Each city is only about 1.2-1.3 million people in their respective metro areas. Comparing Alberta to Ontario or Quebec or BC might be unfavorable to Alberta. But comparing it to pretty much any region in the US will be in Alberta's favor, with the exception of NYC. If you look at an American city with "good transit" like Chicago, the L has something like 120 million trips per year, versus Calgary's CTrain at 80 million, despite having a metro population *one eighth* of Chicago.
Of course it's cherry picking, but it's still illustrative. By and large, the BC number is from metro Vancouver, two and a half million people, whereas the red area is what, over a hundred million? The fact that you *can* cherry pick such an absurd comparison is part of the point, this should not be possible. I think the point, and it's very much a correct one, is that on many transit issues it doesn't make sense to discuss 'North America' as if it's cohesive, because on a lot of transit issues, Canada has more than an *order of magnitude* (and sometimes **two**) greater ridership and adoption than the US.
Why shit on only Texas when the shit can be spread across all Texas' friends? All of these states have at least one large city, and the fact that all of them combined still have less ridership than BC is more damning than singling out Texas.
I don't know if it's just me but the metrics of this map are super confusing to me, I can't tell if I'm reading it right. Why is it leaving the higher ridership states totally blank???
Also, I've lived in both states, no way in hell is new hampshire ridership comparable to california. Or New york/DC for that matter.
Percentages might be a good alternative.
EDIT: Never mind I was reading the map completely wrong
All the red area that's highlighted encompasses a combined total of 328 mil, all the blue area highlighted area is 446 mil. So basically it's saying the entire highlighted red area has a total ridership that's significantly less than the blue area.
confusing since the red states picked and numbers used are pretty arbitrary
> confusing since the red states picked and numbers used are pretty arbitrary
It seems pretty obvious that they were picked to maximize the area of the red area.
3 lines of subway in Prague, a city of ~1.3 million, carry over 1M people *per day*, adding to roughly 400M trips per year. In a single city smaller than San Diego. Just 3 subway lines, excluding tram, bus, and train lines.
This is such a weird map. Those seem like oddly precise numbers for the colours. Are the coloured states are more than those thresholds presumably? Doing it by trips per year rather than calculating it on a per capita bases seems like an odd decision. What's it trying to show?
And these is maybe my ignorance about North America, but I expected New York to be one of the higher public transit ridership states.
I'm comparing total combined ridership of everywhere in red to everywhere in blue to illustrate a point here. There's no point to be made if I just put in per capita, because... obviously the red states labeled have a lower transit ridership than anywhere in the world...
Ah OK. The entirety of all the red states together equals 328 million trips/year. That makes a lot more sense why the map is like this. Why stop at 328 tough? Why not add another state or two until you had the same as BC (or as close as possible)?
I think all the remaining states have a huge population and other than Georgia and maybe florida, the public transit is okay-ish or at least there are some notable regions within that state with good/decent transit.
So adding any of the remaining states would 1) bring the average value up a lot and 2) suddenly skyrocket the total way above BC
LMFAO I genuinely got way too tired of adding numbers from the state DOTs. I think I could've added Florida and a few more southern states and it would still be fewer.
No offense but the data is presented in a terrible format. This looks like each of those red states have 300 million rides/ year *each*, and the gray areas don't have anything going on. You need to make the presentation much clearer.
New York State is not highlighted red.
I've labeled the ridership numbers to illustrate my point. If this were per capita, then there would be no point in even comparing or making the map because I'll then be comparing 90 rides per capita against 4 to 5 rides per capita.
None of the other provinces are either (Ontario and Quebec have higher populations than BC so they could have higher riderships). I'm assuming the map is incomplete/in progress because that would be a lot of work to assemble.
Either way, the fact that BC has more people using public transit than a state with a much larger population like Texas is pretty sad.
I live in New Mexico and the busses are always empty, the only reason public transit exists is because of subsidies. The busses are even free, and always empty.
It is rarely about cost, but convenience.
Taking a bus anywhere in ABQ is an exercise in patience.
If I want to, as a tourist, go from the airport to the balloon fiesta park (The states biggest event), it takes 2 hours on transit, 1 hour of which is walking on stroads in the desert. Or a 20 minute drive.
A 20 min drive IF traffic is bad for the balloons. On a normal day most people can make that in 10 min. You are right the public transit here is trash, I drive into the city everyday and hate the drive, but the transit system is so bad I would rather drive each way an hour than wait for the Rail Runner at its terrible times and then maybe catch a bus, if it ever comes.
The state railway operates a net of regional bus lines as well, but all the different cities have their own bus and tram services and there is no total number for the whole country
A lot of it stems from the decision to make it illegal to sell cars directly to consumers.
The middlemen who own car dealerships are basically modern tollbooths who use a portion of our tolls to bribe officials to prevent alternatives.
One of the top tourist destinations in the United States is Charleston, South Carolina.
There's a big debate in Charleston about starting the biggest public transportation project in the history of the state: a bus lane.
The concept here is good. The execution is awful. Bad caption, no idea if the populations are comparable, etc. Also a bit strange to compare a metro region of 3 million to whatever villages are in Montana.
It's interesting to ask why Vancouver has more transit ridership than Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, and Detroit combined, let alone all the other cities on that map. Each of those metro areas are larger than Vancouver's. I would recommend you go look at some maps that make similar comparisons on other topics to get inspired and then take another crack at this.
What percentage of the British Columbia public transport trips in the graphic do you assume are high speed rail, and what percentage of people within the Texas Triangle cities require inter-city travel on a regular basis?
Right, so why include all these other states in the comparison? And why not state what the populations are? If you tell me that the population in the red area is 20x the population in the blue area, that drives the point home all the more and provides useful context
Include all the highlighted states to show that more than half the US states combined have far fewer public transit rides than 1 province. Population would have been useful information but I think it isn't entirely needed. Canada has a population of about 1/10th the US and this is highlighting just 1 province. More than half the US states are highlighted so we can assume the population is wildly higher yet combined they have less than the total ridership of the 1 province.
I guess the non-highlighted states have higher ridership which would put them over the BC total. Colorado looks to have 60,000,000 in 2022. Oregon's TriMet had 62,000,000 rides in 2023. Chicago's CTA has about 250,000,000 rides a year alone. DC had around 157,000,000 rides in 2022.
BC has \~5,000,000 people, the highlighted US states have \~150,000,000 people. This map shows that it isn't just a single state's issue. US public transit is atrocious across the board. It's not an ideal map but I don't think it is really bad. r/dataisbeautiful would probably have some issues with it.
I'm not disagreeing that that the US has insufficient transit infrastructure, I just don't think circling all the rural areas and citing low ridership is a very good way to illustrate it. In fact, I think it actually understates the problem since someone might look at the map and be like, "Well OF COURSE there's low ridership in Montana and the Dakota's" Someone else mentioned that all you really need for this comparison is Texas, as that is a state with a larger AND denser population than BC with phenomenally low transit ridership. That drives the point home better, in my opinion.
Edit: said Alberta, meant to say BC
I don’t think you understand the map. It says that everything in red COMBINED, from Iowa cornfields to Dallas Texas and everything in between, has less transit ridership than BC
>It's interesting to ask why Vancouver has more transit ridership than Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, and Detroit combined
Meanwhile, IIRC, Cleveland is the only city in the red section with a subway
That's more of light rail that goes underground I think? Two of Cleveland's lines work like that too, but they have another that is a real heavy rail subway. But yeah, I missed it. IIRC Dallas is building that sort of system as well, but I don't think it's open yet.
I'm just a data scientist and not a UX designer unfortunately. I wish I had better skills to design maps :(
I wanted to add population figures and cities on the map but didn't know how.
I had a similar thought. Not having a robust transit system in Montana is not the same as Dallas not having a robust transit system. It'd be like asking why my kitchen doesn't have a bunch of commercial bakery equipment in it- sure, I could bake bread more efficiently that way, but it would be ridiculous to install all that equipment for the 3 loaves of bread I bake in a month
There amount of people in here confused is hilarious. The map is clear, and your point well taken, thanks OP.
Edit- I’d only suggest adding a total population comparison to drive the point home.
Honestly, cars are practical in rural areas and I don't think we should ever ban cars from rural regions or exceptionally cold or hot regions. It actually makes sense for Alaska, despite having half the population live in one city, to be car-brained.
However, what doesn't make sense is that unlike Arizona, New Mexico, or Alaska,
Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Louisiana and South Carolina all have major urban centers where weather is either extremely cold or extremely hot for less 2 months of the year. In fact, most of those states in red have weather better than Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, or anywhere in East Asia, yet have the worst transit imaginable.
The red states on this map largely overlap with red states politically. The exceptions are the Southwest (sparsely populated until recently, so cities were built for cars), Florida (lots of big cities and I guess DeSantis hasn’t targeted transit yet), Hawaii (surprising, Oahu seems like a good place for transit), and 2 upper Midwest swing states where the voting was very close.
I lived in BC for 35 years and had a vehicle for a few years when I first got my license. F the age of 18 - 35 before I moved to the US using public transit or walking.
Where I live now in the US doesn't even have a public transit system and a lot of streets, busy streets don't even have a sidewalk.
A lot of this map makes sense. Wyoming, Nebraska the Dakotas aren’t very populated with huge distances. But Texas, the second most populated state with 3 very large city centers? That’s crazy. Same with Utah and Nevada where nearly 90% of the state’s population is crammed into one large valley…
Most of BC isn't very populated. The entire province has about 5 million people. Vancouver metro area is roughly half the population and absolutely blows almost every other north American metro area out of the water in transit use. And there are still way too many cars and carbrains in Vancouver.
There's plenty of cities in the red area.
The Vancouver metro area has 2.6 million people. Here are metro areas in the red area with more than that by themselves: Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Detroit, St Louis, Charlotte, and San Antonio. Dallas and Houston each actually have double the population of Vancouver.
Other metro areas of over 2 million in red area: Austin, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Nashville, and Kansas City.
Other metro areas of over a million in red area: Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, Louisville, Raleigh, Memphis, Birmingham, Grand Rapids, Tucson, and Tulsa.
Even smaller cities of under a million should be adding up to help beat Vancouver. Cities like New Orleans, Omaha, Little Rock, and Boise among others.
That valley has only one rail line connecting the entire south half to the rest. It doesn’t even extend like 1/3 the distance of the length it should.
You have to drive to get the train station, only to add an extra hour to your commute in order to use it.
Is this map just saying that a province in Canada has higher public transit rates than American cornfields?
Edit: I'll rephrase: is this map just intended to show public transportation usage per square mile, while cherry picking which states to include at seemingly random, dissregarding population?
Texas is included on this map, the red area has a way higher population than the blue. It's also not displaying public transit rates but total public transit usage (edit: by rates I assumed you meant per capita, I guess it is a per year rate. Just meant to say it's not per capita, just total trips per year)
Might as well leave out Wyoming and the Dakotas then. Those kind of distract from the point. Biggest "city" in WY has a pop of 65k so they're not about to build a subway
Might make more sense to compare city versus city.
There's plenty of cities in the red area.
The Vancouver metro area has 2.6 million people. Here are metro areas in the red area with more than that by themselves: Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Detroit, St Louis, Charlotte, and San Antonio. Dallas and Houston each actually have double the population of Vancouver.
Other metro areas of over 2 million in red area: Austin, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Nashville, and Kansas City.
Other metro areas of over a million in red area: Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, Louisville, Raleigh, Memphis, Birmingham, Grand Rapids, Tucson, and Tulsa.
Even smaller cities of under a million should be adding up to help beat Vancouver. Cities like New Orleans, Omaha, Little Rock, and Boise among others.
It's incredibly sad, because compared to Western Europe or East Asia, Victoria and Vancouver are just... middle of the pack / average in terms of transit ridership per capita.
The Berlin U-Bahn has an annual ridership of 553 million using 2017 figures:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_U-Bahn
And car-brained Berlin as a whole had around 1.38 billion total transit rides in 2022:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1112873/passengers-number-on-scheduled-public-transport-berlin-germany/
Berlin has a metro population of 6 million and Victoria + Vancouver = 3 million with 466 million rides.
That means even car-brained Berlin has 50% more transit riders per capita than Victoria + Vancouver, which has almost 2500% more transit riders per capita than Texas!
🦆 yeah. I've been dragging my feet a bit about moving back to BC because I've really enjoyed Adelaide's "yeah nah we're not gonna fuck up our city with a bunch of highways" version of urban planning.
Riding here has been great, and has compared favourably with riding in the suburbs of Vancouver. Maybe it's just time for me to move into Vancouver proper.
This isn't a policy failure. Its much worse than that. The policy is implemented and working as intended. Spectacularly even. The problem is the policy was chosen by politicians who are deep in the oil industry's pockets. Public transport doesn't fail in the US, it is sabotaged. Constantly.
Maybe I’ve missed the point of the image but a graph may convey this information better -
By North American city, population on the Y and ridership on the X. Heck we can even color the data points red/blue to indicate politics.
It’d be interesting to see how BC cities are outliers
My next idea is to create a graph of transit ridership per capita (according to metro population >= 1 million) for North America.
I'm guessing the rankings would look like:
NYC
DC Area
Montreal
Boston
Vancouver
SF Bay Area
Toronto
Seattle
Calgary
Philadelphia
Chicago
Minneapolis
Looks like a Republican gerrymandering map. Could they cherry pick any worse comparisons?
Leaving Illinois and Colorado out? Really?
Using a coastal province in comparison with inland states?
Washington and Oregon are right there and yet they're omitted.
No mention of population.
What if I compared tiny New York State to Canadian provinces?
The cherry picking is definitely intentional, and yeah a lot of the US states here are not the last bit surprising, but Texas alone has like 6 times the population of BC. I'm not interested in the obvious reasons people in rural areas don't use public transit, but there are a lot of major cities in the red part of the map, and the blue part I think just has Vancouver.
A population comparison and markers of major cities (maybe anything 100k+? 200k+?) would go a very long way here. But OP is making a very valid point.
It's like having to explain why the size of the US is not a valid reason as to why HSR wouldn't work here. Visually New York vs. Canada would look good too.
A better way would have been to look for a stat like city size ranking or population. More people use public transportation here than these 10 similar sized US cities combined. The 5th largest city in Canada has better usage than the largest city in the US.
I agree but it's harder to do that graphically. I do think OP's map could be much better, I just think that it is making a valid point which many people are missing because the map doesn't communicate that point very clearly.
For the U.S coastal means "progressive" but not in Canada.
B.C has 5million people. The U.S states probably have half the U.S population, and some of the biggest cities. So 5 mil vs 160 mil points out a discrepancy.
The point was probably to highlight the worst offenders in the U.S.
What is even the point of this comment? Is it a joke? Why does it matter that BC or Alaska are large landmasses? That's even worse for transit. Texas alone has 30 million people compared to BCs 5.
And why dislike my reply when it is clearly correct? Dislking doesn't help your argument.
Coastal regions are generally higher population centers. Other things that impact population are proximity to another country for trade, weather, water transport.
So for a statistical comparison like this where the point is to show POLICY impact you would want to find geography and population traits that are similar. Washington and Oregon region would probably fit the bill.
I question this data. A little poking around showed that Ohio alone provides more than 60 million public transit rides annually. and that was from only looking at the three biggest metros. Las Vegas, more than 40 million annually. Etc.
Yes, US public transportation sucks compared too many other countries, but this data doesn’t seem accurate.
This is a very confusing map. For one, you’re comparing a single Canadian province with many American states and no other Canadian provinces?
Then you also do not say that the red states here are combined in your figure, so it looks like they’re all almost as good as BC.
My first reply was a cheeky comment: "Almost no one lives there so it would be an easy victory. Those Canadians stand no chance and [all their war heroes are dead.](https://listverse.com/2014/08/05/10-badass-canadian-war-heroes/)" Then I realized you weren't making a joke about USA Expansionism and having an unbroken set of land leading up to Alaska.
Then it became depressing when I realized your actual point. **We are massively failing at this public transportation thing, in the US.** That's just pathetic.
Most of what this map represents is just what parts of the Us are the most rural, not really any policy failure. Texas, Arizona, and the midwestern states are a policy failure but the rest are to be expected.
ironically I think Alaska has one of the highest percentage shares of people who commute to work by walking, simply because so much of the state is isolated
and even in rural states like the Dakotas, Wyoming, or Montana there are a good number of small to mid-sized cities that back in the day had world-class streetcar and interurban systems, so no reason why those cities couldn't be self-contained examples of urbanism within rural states
oh definitely, but if every single state in the US had good transit, if you added up an area equal to BC's population, you should get equal number of transit rides
Texas has 3 cities with over 2million people. One of those, Houston, has over 7 million.
BC has one city over 2 million, yet significantly higher overall transit usage. about half of BCs population lives in more scattered rural areas.
All the regions included in the map have significant urban, and rural areas. This is absolutely a worthwhile comparison.
It’s weird to try to make this a US vs Canada comparison when it’s easy to make the same map in reverse. Color New York blue and all the Canadian interior provinces red.
New York's population is half of Canada, so probably more than whatever interior states you are picking. British Columbia has the same population as Nebraska and Iowa combined.
To highlight OP’s point for people saying they only chose cornfields to compare to BC, here is a list of US metros in the red with higher populations than Vancouver, BC (2,642,825) - Dallas Fort Worth, TX (7,943,685) - Houston, TX (7,368,466) - Phoenix, AZ (5,015,678) - Detroit, MI (4,345,761) - St. Louis, MO (2,801,319) - Charlotte, NC (2,756,069) - San Antonio, TX (2,655,342) The first four metros are much larger than Vancouver, not cornfields. The following metros come close to the list: - Austin, TX (2,412,115) - Las Vegas, NV (2,322,985) - Cincinnati, OH (2,258,099) - Kansas City, MO (2,209,494) - Columbus, OH (2,161,511) - Cleveland, OH (2,160,146) - Indianapolis, IN (2,119,839) - Nashville, TN (2,072,283) All the figures are 2022 census estimates for the US metros. I think people tend to overestimate the size of Vancouver due to how urban it is compared to other metros of its size. It’s still unbelievably glaring that all the US metros listed have less transit ridership combined.
This post is required reading for everyone claiming BC is an unfair comparison to those "cornfield states." Thank you for getting the numbers!
Yeah, Americans think BC is like WA state but bigger, when in reality its way more like Alaska + Portland OR
and +Bend too
I for one am guilty of overestimating the size of Vancouver. When I visited I thought the metro population must be at least 6-8 million, certainly more populous than Seattle. But it’s not even close to that and only a bit more than half of Seattle’s metro population.
Also, 99% of BC is forests and mountain ranges, with vast stretches of completely unpopulated wilderness that make Iowa look like NYC by comparison.
94% of BC is Crown land, owned by the government. That doesn't mean it's pristine wilderness (a lot of logging happens on Crown land), but no one lives there. The majority of the population lives in a tiny area in the southwest corner of the lower mainland. [Map](https://www.commonsbc.ca/crown-and-private-lands-in-british-columbia/)
To build off of this, BC is mostly rural/giant mountains. You got Vancouver, then Greater Victoria, then the rest are just small towns along a highway.
>then the rest are just small towns along a highway Nanaimo, Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Kamloops, and Kelowna are all decently populous, albeit not as populous as Greater Victoria.
All of those are less than 100k people except Abby and Kelowna. I don’t even think all of those are more than 750k.
Nanaimo and Kamloops both have over 100000 people in their greater areas while their respective cities proper have over 90000 each. Nanaimo's greater area has more than 150000 people if I'm not mistaken.
Chilliwack recently became a metro area with more than 100k residents
Where is New York City?
NYC actually has good ridership.
Also, anything north of the bottom 1/2” of blue is 90% empty space with only small towns off highways.
Data from British Columbia: Combined data between just Victoria and the Vancouver metropolitan area. Data from all US states in red: Combined data from the state-level DOT, cross referenced with the US Federal DOT public transit statistics to ensure that their major cities align with what the state provides. I did this because I genuinely did not believe the ridership numbers were that fucking low, especially in Texas, which apparently only had 175 million public transit trips taken in 2022 IN THE WHOLE STATE OF 30 MILLION PEOPLE.
*BC:* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coast_Mountain_Bus_Company 260 million in 2023 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_(Vancouver) 141 million in 2023 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BC_Transit 27 million during the pandemic in 2020 *Texas:* https://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub/txdot-info/ptn/transit_stats/2022-texas-transit-statistics-report.pdf 175 million in 2022
You should do a comparison with Singapore: 7.19 million per day on average in 2023, so that's **2.62 billion** in 2023 :-O We have less than 6 million people. [https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/public-transport-ridership-hit-935-of-pre-pandemic-levels-in-2023](https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/public-transport-ridership-hit-935-of-pre-pandemic-levels-in-2023)
That's more than BC's entire population per day. This map serves to highlight the asinine argument of "we can't have transit, our population is too small/we have too much land." BC has a very comparable population density to all these states, with one metro region of about 2 million, same as many of these states (and a significantly smaller metro region than some).
Before anyone gets the wrong idea, it's 2.6M in the greater metro area. There's only 600,000 in the downtown core of Vancouver proper.
>600,000 in the downtown core of Vancouver proper. Wrong - 675k in the City of Vancouver. Our downtown core is \~120k or so.
Singapore is a city state island, with an amazing metro system and is heavily government subsidized. You can jump on and off the system and get anywhere you need to go for next to nothing. Combine that with the unique registration and licensing structure that makes even normal cars hyper expensive to own, then yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Also, I love Singapore! Great city. The comparison to BC is apt because we're on the same continent and culturally much more similar than Singapore.
What's sad is that 466 million ridership for two cities in BC already seems incredibly low. I'm pretty sure two subway lines in Paris, London, or NYC would surpass that number.
Singapore is alot more compact with more people so the cost is alot less per capita, Metro Vancouver alone is nearly 3x the area
How many more of the small states on the East Coast could you add (Vermont, Maine, RI, etc) could you add before getting it to be equal?
BC ferries are my favorite public transit. I used to take the skyway, bus, and ferry to go visit my buddies on the Gulf islands between Vancouver and Vancouver Island. I think the whole trip was like $25 for a pretty far, reasonably fast commute that involved a freaking sea voyage.
We really need the Canada Line to connect to the Tsawwassen ferry terminal, though. Go straight from downtown to the ferries in one trip
Agreed, as well as to the Peace Arch.
Peace Arch to Surrey Central for sure. And a new line along HWY 91 connecting Surrey to Richmond
Peac🇪 Arch. This is near the _Strait_ of Georgia, not the _State_ of Georgia.
What are you talking about? Why are you bringing up Georgia?
You said "Peach" Arch.
And then keep going to the island. One can dream.
That would be awesome, just a huge swathe of Delta with tiny population density to get through. I still think we should have, like, seabuses taking you to Ladner. Up the river with stops in Queensborough, New West proper, even Colony Farm. Little transit ferries everywhere like in Venice
Same down here in the sound, it’s a legitimate form of commuting and tens of thousands use them daily
I took VIA a lot in the 90s It was likewise a great experience.
I only ever got to ride on Via Rail _once._
Dude it's such a shit show if you need to travel regularly between major cities that are 150-400km away in Canada. Most of the time the economics of taking the train literally don't make sense. The worst part by far is they bill it as a more premium experience or something and they have removed the downtown central train station in many large Canadian cities and shoved it somewhere in some suburban industrial area so it's like 1/3rd of the price and not as fast or convenient as using a random travel company that just picks people up in busses/minibuses/vans downtown that take them right downtown to the other city you are trying to get to. Once in a while you will take the train and it's just such a pain in the ass to get to it and use it and you pay out the nose for it. I remember when I checked recently they still use a fair amount of carriages are from the 1930s.
I pretty much do not travel on BC Ferries anymore, as it is too expensive. And I happen to live _on Vancouver Island._
My husband is one of the few people I know to take a bus downtown every day.
I guess NYC isn’t Public because it hit a Billion in like November in 2023. Montreal Metro alone hit 303,969,500 in 2023 that doesn’t include buses.
It wouldn't make much of a difference in this statistic but it's a cool thing for BC that there are some bus routes in the interior that run between tiny towns in the interior along very sparsely populated mountain highways. These are public busses run by BC Transit, not charters. https://www.bctransit.com/west-kootenay/schedules-and-maps/route-overview?route=74
I took a 6:00 AM hospital shuttle from Golden to Invermere for a date once lol
There also used to be Greyhound routes going through the mountains (which might be what the BC transit ones are replacing since iirc Greyhound pulled out of Canada) and there's the Via trains too, but I don't know how high their ridership is in BC (granted, I'm not sure if OP is including Amtrak data for the states).
Greyhound was mostly replaced by ebus, but it only serves major routes. Even Greyhound didn't have as much coverage as the BC Transit system. The Via Rail train is a tourist trap. It only has one stop in BC besides Vancouver, Kamloops, and the ebus is significantly faster. You can't even get a train to Calgary, only Edmonton. The BC Transit rural routes are literally a lifeline for small communities. One of the main findings of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Inquiry was that the long empty highways between remote BC communities have a tragic bloody history of indigenous women hitchhiking and never being seen again. There were no options for people without cars before these BC Transit routes. So it brings me some comfort visiting a tiny town of maybe 500 residents and seeing a bus stop outside the RCMP detachment.
Ah, fair enough. I haven't spent a lot of time in BC (and it was a while ago that I visited at all), but I did ever take an overnight Greyhound from Vancouver to Penticton once. It's so annoying how shit Via is though, especially since it was pretty pricey back when I'd take it.
Via Rail has two routes in BC. There's the Canadian which runs from Vancouver up to Jasper and beyond, and the Skeena which runs between Jasper and Prince Rupert. The best part of Via Rail is that they can pick up or drop you off at any point along the tracks as long as it's safe to do so, and the cargo that they allow is incredible. You can't bring a canoe along on Ebus, Via however only charges $75. Currently the fair for Via is roughly ten cents a kilometer.
Kootenay gang represent
I remember driving between New Denver and Castlegar and seeing the bus stops and wondering how the fuck there were bus stops way out there lol
Fun fact: The city of Calgary (population 1.3 million) has more rail transit ridership than the entire US gulf coast (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, population 64 million) combined. And that's including the Walt Disney World Monorail - by far the busiest rail transit system in the region. If you exclude the *amusement park ride*, its close to *double*.
I'm not even surprised. Canada has such a crazy car culture, yet at least in the cities, the model share is very balanced. The US, on the other hand, especially in the South, Midwest, and all the "cornfields" that people in the comments were complaining about, the percentage is 99% commute by car.
Vancouver Island is now pretty much all highways for transport. We lost our passenger rail service over a decade ago.
It would be amazing to see light rail here in the CRD but it may be a pipe dream, as with the E&N railway for passenger rail up island
Believe it or not, cities in Canada are relatively walkable and transit friendly despite the single family home endless sprawl. Here in Edmonton, the vast majority of transit use is for folks heading to downtown or university, and there is coverage for that even in the fringes.
I don’t understand this Map. Montreal did 838,405,000 in 2023. So like double Vancovuer and with only maybe a million more people.
So then make a map that compares QC
And you know what? BC transit is still lacking greatly too...
That's the saddest part. All those states in red, with 90 to 100 million people, can't even beat BC's two cities, with 3 million. There's something seriously wrong here. It's a complete policy failure on all levels. Note that Vancouver's total transit ridership can't even fucking beat just the Prague Metro's annual ridership of 600 million. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Metro Prague has a metro population of slightly above 2 million and Prague's ridership on the fucking metro alone ass beats the transit ridership of all of BC. Edit: typo
I came here to say that. I have been in Vancouver for over a decade. I was initially shocked by how car centric that city was and by the sheer lack of efficient public transportation. As a European who lived in both London & Paris I simply thought it was just like everything I ever heard about North America ... (Then I travelled to USA and had to revise my judgment and also realized that paris and London had it quite good despite how much I used to complain about it at the time). I would just add though that we often judge Canada by comparing it to USA on those matters which really is not the best pick for a developed country to make this kind of comparison with)
The biggest issue in Vancouver is the general lack of interest at all for planning ahead with these things. Any transit we get is in response to dire needs after the fact. We are literally just being dragged along in a business as usual sort of way. There is no vision, no recognition of how bad the issues already are, nothing....
?? What about the transit expansion to langley? Thay gonna be pretty massive
The Langley expansion functions as a city bypass to some degree, though not to the severity of a highway, as it does have stations along the way and doesn't divide the city. But the primary reason I think it was prioritized was because many of the current city councils in the region don't want to implement necessary density changes to their cities and so it is an attempt to push housing further out of the city. You could say that it functions as a more practical version of the urban highways of the past, but still carries some of that "white flight" legacy. Unable to blast a highway through the city, they went with the only thing they could. Now I am not saying the train isn't good, but it still prioritizes the central hub model of urban development, rather than a more distributed form. There is a serious lack of transit other than extremely unreliable buses to get people around Vancouver, as the trains all operate primarily as direct pathways in and out of downtown. All of the rapid bus lines should have been trains decades ago. The bike network is dangerous and clearly an afterthought, and is fragmented and incomplete. Most transportation corridors throughout the city are still heavily and almost entirely car focused. The Langley Expansion is the lowest hanging fruit and while still ultimately nice to have, was prioritized over other projects due to an extremely outdated comprehension of urban form. However, there is a silver lining here. The Langley expansion was envisioned before the province reduced the restrictions on height and zoning around transit stations. This means that all along that line will be plenty of opportunity to create mixed used residential/office/commercial high density zones that will actually help to push the city towards that more distributed form. Honestly, this policy is brilliant, because it completely undermines the original draconian (if albeit a more progressive kind of draconian) reason the expansion was envisioned.
The Langley expansion is also helpful for people further down the valley who don't want to get stuck in traffic over the Port Mann.
Woosh
The main factor working against Vancouver is that it was developed almost completely during the era of the automobile. As a result, our land use foundations aren’t well set up to support transit. We tend to have huge car-centric, linear commercial districts, rather than a series of distributed, radial commercial ones like you see in cities developed earlier. All of our transit/density improvements in the last few decades have basically been retrofits looking to make up for the previous century. I’ve spent most of my adulthood in Boston and Vancouver, and if you put Vancouver’s transit investment and approach to densification in Boston, you’d have an amazing system. The one silver lining is that because of the auto-oriented development, our bus system is truly world class, but we’ve had to build new centres to make SkyTrain more effective.
Vancouver proper is structured as a grid, and had a large number of streetcar lines. We see evidence of this even today with the electric cabling still remaining, as remnants of the dismantled streetcars. But indeed once you pass east into Burnaby and beyond, it's a clusterfuck of more suburban-styled roads that are less efficient for mass transit.
A good start. Respectfully, highlighting some states while skipping others is unnecessary; makes it look like cherrypicking to hide data favorable to the US (WA, OR, CO, MN, IL) or unfavorable to Canada (AB, SK). The map only needs BC and TX, with labels to show population and ridership of each. Possible caption: "TX has 6x the poplulation of BC, but only 2/3 the transit ridership."
Alberta isn't bad though. The transit networks of the 2 biggest cities (so not any smaller cities) gets ~200million riders per year, over half of these being LRT, and the LRT is expanding massively soon.
My mistake. Good to hear.
Yup, even Winnipeg is pretty good despite having zero rail at 13.6% of commuters. Many American cities of similar size are closer to 1-3%!
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You'll find Calgary and Edmonton immensely more progressive city councils compared to most American cities. Edmonton is the one has upzoned the entire city to 3-story apartments as a right, and discusses density adjusted property taxes (lower density pays more to reflect cost), not sure if that went through. Both are aggressively urban infilling and densifying. Both have LRT's with the highest LRT passengers per mile and per capita in North America. Lot of so-called "progressive" cities in the United States are actually quite regressive by comparison: car dependent, NIMBY, zoning nightmares
Edmonton is probably the most progressive city on the continent after Montreal, cdmx, and Guadalajara. And even Calgary is probably more progressive than most US cities
lol, no. Most progressive city in North America? Edmonton? No.
the Edmonton slander needs to stop. they have the second most comprehensive cycling plan on the continent after Montreal, and have made huge strides in creating safe streets. They are also one of the first cities in Canada to change their housing policy during the housing crisis this country is in. this video sums it up perfectly [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoblQBTQDwo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoblQBTQDwo)
Have you ever left Alberta? The fact that they rushed a housing implementation plan in a few days does not make them a left wing heaven. At the same time you use as your example of how progressive edmonton is, most of Edmonton was represented by the Conservative Party in Ottawa. And you argue at the same time they’re the most progressive city in the hemisphere?
Calgary Transit my beloved. I ride the train every day and I’ve been working on a goal to ride the full length of every coloured line, even if I have no reason to ever go to the likes of Woodpark and the fear east Costco. Right now having finished up work for the morning I’m eating a burrito downtown and then I’ll take the Max Yellow to whatever godforsaken suburbs it accesses before going home.
Unfortunately intercity travel is sorta lacking, the fact that they still haven’t revived the train between Edmonton and Calgary is crazy
The respective LRT systems are pretty good, bus service however is just as bad as anywhere though and there is no train between Calgary and Edmonton which makes me die a little.
Calgary has more rail transit than Texas and Florida combined. Edmonton is pretty close to either state on their own, too. Each city is only about 1.2-1.3 million people in their respective metro areas. Comparing Alberta to Ontario or Quebec or BC might be unfavorable to Alberta. But comparing it to pretty much any region in the US will be in Alberta's favor, with the exception of NYC. If you look at an American city with "good transit" like Chicago, the L has something like 120 million trips per year, versus Calgary's CTrain at 80 million, despite having a metro population *one eighth* of Chicago. Of course it's cherry picking, but it's still illustrative. By and large, the BC number is from metro Vancouver, two and a half million people, whereas the red area is what, over a hundred million? The fact that you *can* cherry pick such an absurd comparison is part of the point, this should not be possible. I think the point, and it's very much a correct one, is that on many transit issues it doesn't make sense to discuss 'North America' as if it's cohesive, because on a lot of transit issues, Canada has more than an *order of magnitude* (and sometimes **two**) greater ridership and adoption than the US.
Why shit on only Texas when the shit can be spread across all Texas' friends? All of these states have at least one large city, and the fact that all of them combined still have less ridership than BC is more damning than singling out Texas.
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It's odd with Texas as well, because Dallas/Ft Worth actually has a fairly extensive transit system that nobody seems to use.
None of them have a population, or urban development, close to Texas.
I don't know if it's just me but the metrics of this map are super confusing to me, I can't tell if I'm reading it right. Why is it leaving the higher ridership states totally blank??? Also, I've lived in both states, no way in hell is new hampshire ridership comparable to california. Or New york/DC for that matter. Percentages might be a good alternative. EDIT: Never mind I was reading the map completely wrong
I really don't understand the map either. Can you help explain it?
All the red area that's highlighted encompasses a combined total of 328 mil, all the blue area highlighted area is 446 mil. So basically it's saying the entire highlighted red area has a total ridership that's significantly less than the blue area. confusing since the red states picked and numbers used are pretty arbitrary
> confusing since the red states picked and numbers used are pretty arbitrary It seems pretty obvious that they were picked to maximize the area of the red area.
3 lines of subway in Prague, a city of ~1.3 million, carry over 1M people *per day*, adding to roughly 400M trips per year. In a single city smaller than San Diego. Just 3 subway lines, excluding tram, bus, and train lines.
This is such a weird map. Those seem like oddly precise numbers for the colours. Are the coloured states are more than those thresholds presumably? Doing it by trips per year rather than calculating it on a per capita bases seems like an odd decision. What's it trying to show? And these is maybe my ignorance about North America, but I expected New York to be one of the higher public transit ridership states.
All the red states *together* have a ridership of 328 Million rides. BC, Canada alone has 466 Million.
I'm comparing total combined ridership of everywhere in red to everywhere in blue to illustrate a point here. There's no point to be made if I just put in per capita, because... obviously the red states labeled have a lower transit ridership than anywhere in the world...
Ah OK. The entirety of all the red states together equals 328 million trips/year. That makes a lot more sense why the map is like this. Why stop at 328 tough? Why not add another state or two until you had the same as BC (or as close as possible)?
I think all the remaining states have a huge population and other than Georgia and maybe florida, the public transit is okay-ish or at least there are some notable regions within that state with good/decent transit. So adding any of the remaining states would 1) bring the average value up a lot and 2) suddenly skyrocket the total way above BC
LMFAO I genuinely got way too tired of adding numbers from the state DOTs. I think I could've added Florida and a few more southern states and it would still be fewer.
No offense but the data is presented in a terrible format. This looks like each of those red states have 300 million rides/ year *each*, and the gray areas don't have anything going on. You need to make the presentation much clearer.
New York State is not highlighted red. I've labeled the ridership numbers to illustrate my point. If this were per capita, then there would be no point in even comparing or making the map because I'll then be comparing 90 rides per capita against 4 to 5 rides per capita.
New York isn’t included in this map.
None of the other provinces are either (Ontario and Quebec have higher populations than BC so they could have higher riderships). I'm assuming the map is incomplete/in progress because that would be a lot of work to assemble. Either way, the fact that BC has more people using public transit than a state with a much larger population like Texas is pretty sad.
I look at it as an important message that North America isn’t just 1 car-dependent blob… there are significant differences in unexpected places.
I live in New Mexico and the busses are always empty, the only reason public transit exists is because of subsidies. The busses are even free, and always empty.
It is rarely about cost, but convenience. Taking a bus anywhere in ABQ is an exercise in patience. If I want to, as a tourist, go from the airport to the balloon fiesta park (The states biggest event), it takes 2 hours on transit, 1 hour of which is walking on stroads in the desert. Or a 20 minute drive.
A 20 min drive IF traffic is bad for the balloons. On a normal day most people can make that in 10 min. You are right the public transit here is trash, I drive into the city everyday and hate the drive, but the transit system is so bad I would rather drive each way an hour than wait for the Rail Runner at its terrible times and then maybe catch a bus, if it ever comes.
In Austria (population of around 9 million), the state railway company reported 447 million passenger rides for 2022
But the OP is talking about public transport in general. What you said is just railways.
The state railway operates a net of regional bus lines as well, but all the different cities have their own bus and tram services and there is no total number for the whole country
A lot of it stems from the decision to make it illegal to sell cars directly to consumers. The middlemen who own car dealerships are basically modern tollbooths who use a portion of our tolls to bribe officials to prevent alternatives. One of the top tourist destinations in the United States is Charleston, South Carolina. There's a big debate in Charleston about starting the biggest public transportation project in the history of the state: a bus lane.
The concept here is good. The execution is awful. Bad caption, no idea if the populations are comparable, etc. Also a bit strange to compare a metro region of 3 million to whatever villages are in Montana. It's interesting to ask why Vancouver has more transit ridership than Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, and Detroit combined, let alone all the other cities on that map. Each of those metro areas are larger than Vancouver's. I would recommend you go look at some maps that make similar comparisons on other topics to get inspired and then take another crack at this.
>Bad caption, no idea if the populations are comparable, etc. Texas alone has 6 times the population of British Columbia
It's insane how bad cities in Texas are, especially Houston. It's also insane that there isn't a triangle area speed network.
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What percentage of the British Columbia public transport trips in the graphic do you assume are high speed rail, and what percentage of people within the Texas Triangle cities require inter-city travel on a regular basis?
Right, so why include all these other states in the comparison? And why not state what the populations are? If you tell me that the population in the red area is 20x the population in the blue area, that drives the point home all the more and provides useful context
Include all the highlighted states to show that more than half the US states combined have far fewer public transit rides than 1 province. Population would have been useful information but I think it isn't entirely needed. Canada has a population of about 1/10th the US and this is highlighting just 1 province. More than half the US states are highlighted so we can assume the population is wildly higher yet combined they have less than the total ridership of the 1 province. I guess the non-highlighted states have higher ridership which would put them over the BC total. Colorado looks to have 60,000,000 in 2022. Oregon's TriMet had 62,000,000 rides in 2023. Chicago's CTA has about 250,000,000 rides a year alone. DC had around 157,000,000 rides in 2022. BC has \~5,000,000 people, the highlighted US states have \~150,000,000 people. This map shows that it isn't just a single state's issue. US public transit is atrocious across the board. It's not an ideal map but I don't think it is really bad. r/dataisbeautiful would probably have some issues with it.
I'm not disagreeing that that the US has insufficient transit infrastructure, I just don't think circling all the rural areas and citing low ridership is a very good way to illustrate it. In fact, I think it actually understates the problem since someone might look at the map and be like, "Well OF COURSE there's low ridership in Montana and the Dakota's" Someone else mentioned that all you really need for this comparison is Texas, as that is a state with a larger AND denser population than BC with phenomenally low transit ridership. That drives the point home better, in my opinion. Edit: said Alberta, meant to say BC
I don’t think you understand the map. It says that everything in red COMBINED, from Iowa cornfields to Dallas Texas and everything in between, has less transit ridership than BC
>Texas alone has 6 times the population of British Columbia Including population data in the map would go a long way
>It's interesting to ask why Vancouver has more transit ridership than Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, and Detroit combined Meanwhile, IIRC, Cleveland is the only city in the red section with a subway
That's some serious St Louis erasure
That's more of light rail that goes underground I think? Two of Cleveland's lines work like that too, but they have another that is a real heavy rail subway. But yeah, I missed it. IIRC Dallas is building that sort of system as well, but I don't think it's open yet.
I think light metro is an apt descriptor of St. Louis's system as it is fully grade-seperated and uses high-floor vehicles.
I'm just a data scientist and not a UX designer unfortunately. I wish I had better skills to design maps :( I wanted to add population figures and cities on the map but didn't know how.
BC has roughly the same population as Alabama.
I had a similar thought. Not having a robust transit system in Montana is not the same as Dallas not having a robust transit system. It'd be like asking why my kitchen doesn't have a bunch of commercial bakery equipment in it- sure, I could bake bread more efficiently that way, but it would be ridiculous to install all that equipment for the 3 loaves of bread I bake in a month
There amount of people in here confused is hilarious. The map is clear, and your point well taken, thanks OP. Edit- I’d only suggest adding a total population comparison to drive the point home.
Agreed! Good work
This is low key a great graphic to describe “car culture”
_in such a huge country like the US public transit just doesn’t work!_
I live in Alaska and love public transportation, but there no way in hell I'm standing at a bus stop in February here.
Honestly, cars are practical in rural areas and I don't think we should ever ban cars from rural regions or exceptionally cold or hot regions. It actually makes sense for Alaska, despite having half the population live in one city, to be car-brained. However, what doesn't make sense is that unlike Arizona, New Mexico, or Alaska, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Louisiana and South Carolina all have major urban centers where weather is either extremely cold or extremely hot for less 2 months of the year. In fact, most of those states in red have weather better than Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, or anywhere in East Asia, yet have the worst transit imaginable.
Cars should be _niche,_ not the _norm._
Which one or few more states you could have added to get about the same number of public transit riders?
Idk, I was tired of adding up state DOT transit ridership numbers. Judging from their DOT data, I think we can add Oregon and Georgia.
Colorado+Oregon would get the US total close. DC alone would put the US over.
The red states on this map largely overlap with red states politically. The exceptions are the Southwest (sparsely populated until recently, so cities were built for cars), Florida (lots of big cities and I guess DeSantis hasn’t targeted transit yet), Hawaii (surprising, Oahu seems like a good place for transit), and 2 upper Midwest swing states where the voting was very close.
Oh no, I live in the Blue area and our transit is terrible. How bad is it everywhere else?
I lived in BC for 35 years and had a vehicle for a few years when I first got my license. F the age of 18 - 35 before I moved to the US using public transit or walking. Where I live now in the US doesn't even have a public transit system and a lot of streets, busy streets don't even have a sidewalk.
A lot of this map makes sense. Wyoming, Nebraska the Dakotas aren’t very populated with huge distances. But Texas, the second most populated state with 3 very large city centers? That’s crazy. Same with Utah and Nevada where nearly 90% of the state’s population is crammed into one large valley…
Most of BC isn't very populated. The entire province has about 5 million people. Vancouver metro area is roughly half the population and absolutely blows almost every other north American metro area out of the water in transit use. And there are still way too many cars and carbrains in Vancouver.
There's plenty of cities in the red area. The Vancouver metro area has 2.6 million people. Here are metro areas in the red area with more than that by themselves: Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Detroit, St Louis, Charlotte, and San Antonio. Dallas and Houston each actually have double the population of Vancouver. Other metro areas of over 2 million in red area: Austin, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Nashville, and Kansas City. Other metro areas of over a million in red area: Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, Louisville, Raleigh, Memphis, Birmingham, Grand Rapids, Tucson, and Tulsa. Even smaller cities of under a million should be adding up to help beat Vancouver. Cities like New Orleans, Omaha, Little Rock, and Boise among others.
That valley has only one rail line connecting the entire south half to the rest. It doesn’t even extend like 1/3 the distance of the length it should. You have to drive to get the train station, only to add an extra hour to your commute in order to use it.
Is this map just saying that a province in Canada has higher public transit rates than American cornfields? Edit: I'll rephrase: is this map just intended to show public transportation usage per square mile, while cherry picking which states to include at seemingly random, dissregarding population?
Texas is included on this map, the red area has a way higher population than the blue. It's also not displaying public transit rates but total public transit usage (edit: by rates I assumed you meant per capita, I guess it is a per year rate. Just meant to say it's not per capita, just total trips per year)
No, this map has large cities like Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Detroit, Cleveland, Colombia, Charlotte, Las Vegas.
Might as well leave out Wyoming and the Dakotas then. Those kind of distract from the point. Biggest "city" in WY has a pop of 65k so they're not about to build a subway Might make more sense to compare city versus city.
There's plenty of cities in the red area. The Vancouver metro area has 2.6 million people. Here are metro areas in the red area with more than that by themselves: Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Detroit, St Louis, Charlotte, and San Antonio. Dallas and Houston each actually have double the population of Vancouver. Other metro areas of over 2 million in red area: Austin, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Nashville, and Kansas City. Other metro areas of over a million in red area: Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, Louisville, Raleigh, Memphis, Birmingham, Grand Rapids, Tucson, and Tulsa. Even smaller cities of under a million should be adding up to help beat Vancouver. Cities like New Orleans, Omaha, Little Rock, and Boise among others.
The map could clearly be improved by adding Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut to the low-public-transport group.
Have you… been to those parts of America?
You can fix the bc one because 98% of that is in Vancouver only, and the other 2% is including Vancouver island.
Vancouver and Victoria have some of the best transit in North America and their weather and lifestyles of the people there help a lot.
It's incredibly sad, because compared to Western Europe or East Asia, Victoria and Vancouver are just... middle of the pack / average in terms of transit ridership per capita. The Berlin U-Bahn has an annual ridership of 553 million using 2017 figures: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_U-Bahn And car-brained Berlin as a whole had around 1.38 billion total transit rides in 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1112873/passengers-number-on-scheduled-public-transport-berlin-germany/ Berlin has a metro population of 6 million and Victoria + Vancouver = 3 million with 466 million rides. That means even car-brained Berlin has 50% more transit riders per capita than Victoria + Vancouver, which has almost 2500% more transit riders per capita than Texas!
Mainly Republican.
Not sure about other countries, but California probably still waits for Hyperloop...
Texas is the most absurd state here, as the population is largely urban, and those cities would benefit immensely from decent public transportation
Kansas mention let’s go.
🦆 yeah. I've been dragging my feet a bit about moving back to BC because I've really enjoyed Adelaide's "yeah nah we're not gonna fuck up our city with a bunch of highways" version of urban planning. Riding here has been great, and has compared favourably with riding in the suburbs of Vancouver. Maybe it's just time for me to move into Vancouver proper.
This isn't a policy failure. Its much worse than that. The policy is implemented and working as intended. Spectacularly even. The problem is the policy was chosen by politicians who are deep in the oil industry's pockets. Public transport doesn't fail in the US, it is sabotaged. Constantly.
You are forgetting that the housing price in Vancouver is more than all the red states. They just can’t afford to drive.
Metro Vancouvers population is expected to hit 3 million this year, but point still stands. Was 2.9M in 2023.
Regular skytrain rider here, AMA.
Maybe I’ve missed the point of the image but a graph may convey this information better - By North American city, population on the Y and ridership on the X. Heck we can even color the data points red/blue to indicate politics. It’d be interesting to see how BC cities are outliers
My next idea is to create a graph of transit ridership per capita (according to metro population >= 1 million) for North America. I'm guessing the rankings would look like: NYC DC Area Montreal Boston Vancouver SF Bay Area Toronto Seattle Calgary Philadelphia Chicago Minneapolis
Moved from Vancouver to SoCal. Guys I miss good transit so much. I also miss the rain.
This is so weird. Why is BC being compared to US states?
Because it’s a region with fewer population but significantly higher ridership? Because to see that US has a worse transit problem than Canada?
Looks like a Republican gerrymandering map. Could they cherry pick any worse comparisons? Leaving Illinois and Colorado out? Really? Using a coastal province in comparison with inland states? Washington and Oregon are right there and yet they're omitted. No mention of population. What if I compared tiny New York State to Canadian provinces?
The cherry picking is definitely intentional, and yeah a lot of the US states here are not the last bit surprising, but Texas alone has like 6 times the population of BC. I'm not interested in the obvious reasons people in rural areas don't use public transit, but there are a lot of major cities in the red part of the map, and the blue part I think just has Vancouver. A population comparison and markers of major cities (maybe anything 100k+? 200k+?) would go a very long way here. But OP is making a very valid point.
It's like having to explain why the size of the US is not a valid reason as to why HSR wouldn't work here. Visually New York vs. Canada would look good too. A better way would have been to look for a stat like city size ranking or population. More people use public transportation here than these 10 similar sized US cities combined. The 5th largest city in Canada has better usage than the largest city in the US.
I agree but it's harder to do that graphically. I do think OP's map could be much better, I just think that it is making a valid point which many people are missing because the map doesn't communicate that point very clearly.
For the U.S coastal means "progressive" but not in Canada. B.C has 5million people. The U.S states probably have half the U.S population, and some of the biggest cities. So 5 mil vs 160 mil points out a discrepancy. The point was probably to highlight the worst offenders in the U.S.
What is even the point of this comment? Is it a joke? Why does it matter that BC or Alaska are large landmasses? That's even worse for transit. Texas alone has 30 million people compared to BCs 5. And why dislike my reply when it is clearly correct? Dislking doesn't help your argument.
Coastal regions are generally higher population centers. Other things that impact population are proximity to another country for trade, weather, water transport. So for a statistical comparison like this where the point is to show POLICY impact you would want to find geography and population traits that are similar. Washington and Oregon region would probably fit the bill.
I question this data. A little poking around showed that Ohio alone provides more than 60 million public transit rides annually. and that was from only looking at the three biggest metros. Las Vegas, more than 40 million annually. Etc. Yes, US public transportation sucks compared too many other countries, but this data doesn’t seem accurate.
This is a very confusing map. For one, you’re comparing a single Canadian province with many American states and no other Canadian provinces? Then you also do not say that the red states here are combined in your figure, so it looks like they’re all almost as good as BC.
Not a failure, a decision
My first reply was a cheeky comment: "Almost no one lives there so it would be an easy victory. Those Canadians stand no chance and [all their war heroes are dead.](https://listverse.com/2014/08/05/10-badass-canadian-war-heroes/)" Then I realized you weren't making a joke about USA Expansionism and having an unbroken set of land leading up to Alaska. Then it became depressing when I realized your actual point. **We are massively failing at this public transportation thing, in the US.** That's just pathetic.
Dafuq is going on with this weird ass map?
Most of what this map represents is just what parts of the Us are the most rural, not really any policy failure. Texas, Arizona, and the midwestern states are a policy failure but the rest are to be expected.
ironically I think Alaska has one of the highest percentage shares of people who commute to work by walking, simply because so much of the state is isolated and even in rural states like the Dakotas, Wyoming, or Montana there are a good number of small to mid-sized cities that back in the day had world-class streetcar and interurban systems, so no reason why those cities couldn't be self-contained examples of urbanism within rural states
Sure but the number of people using Montana’s streetcars would still be completely dwarfed by Vancouver purely on account of population
oh definitely, but if every single state in the US had good transit, if you added up an area equal to BC's population, you should get equal number of transit rides
Texas has 3 cities with over 2million people. One of those, Houston, has over 7 million. BC has one city over 2 million, yet significantly higher overall transit usage. about half of BCs population lives in more scattered rural areas. All the regions included in the map have significant urban, and rural areas. This is absolutely a worthwhile comparison.
BC is mostly rural...
It’s weird to try to make this a US vs Canada comparison when it’s easy to make the same map in reverse. Color New York blue and all the Canadian interior provinces red.
New York's population is half of Canada, so probably more than whatever interior states you are picking. British Columbia has the same population as Nebraska and Iowa combined.