When U.S. News labeled Portland as the #1 transit city in the U.S., and Seattle came in 11th and tied with the District of Columbia, we didn’t bother to mention it, even in a news roundup. Our laziness instincts proved to be correct, because via Human Transit, Portland Afoot discovers the methodology may not make any sense:
My one-sentence summary: This article cited out-of-date population figures and was calculated with a methodology that U.S. News refused to explain, based on figures that U.S. News refused to share.
Jarrett goes on to rightfully question the entire enterprise:
If ten-best lists are about something that’s reasonably factual (“ten most reliable transit systems,” “ten safest transit systems”, “top ten in ridership per capita”) then they can be useful. They can encourage excellence and help people reward that excellence with ridership and investment.
But when you tell your readers that certain transit systems are the “best,” and don’t explain your criteria very well, you signal that everyone must have the same sense of what’s good. That encourages people to go into transit debates as bullies, assuming that if a transit agency doesn’t deliver on their notion of the good, the agency must be incompetent or failing, so the only valid response is abuse. It encourages people not to notice that “failing to do what I want” is often a result of “doing what someone else wants.”
To pile on a bit, the messages here are pretty conflated. Even if one could define it, “best transit agency” is very different from “best city to rely on transit,” because factors out of the agency’s control (especially land use) largely determine the effectiveness of the transit system. Furthermore, there are the eternal city-vs-metro-area questions. The ranking for the 8.5m in New York City is obviously completely different than one that considers all 19m or so people in greater New York.
If you really want to rank user experience with transit, you can do worse than looking at car ownership rates, in which Seattle proper comes in 50th among cities with 100,000 or more residents. Portland is not in the top 50. On the other hand, the list is partially an indication of relative wealth*, and policy treatment of cars that makes driving and parking them a pain.
* For a very rough sketch, if you take the 45 cities both on the Wikipedia list and with good household poverty data, in terms of “lowest car ownership among households not in poverty” (assuming no poor households have cars), Seattle comes in 14th. That actually mixes data from different censuses, but the point is that simple additions to the criteria cause wild swings in the rankings.
Thanks for the sanity on this BS.
Magazine lists are generally put together in a half-assed way by an intern or reporter with little if any knowledge on the subject, little supervision, and no academic rigor at all. It’s entertainment, and designed only to sell magazines. That’s why lists tend to be apples-vs-oranges even when they tell you the criteria, which tend to be BS as well.
I given them a tiny bit more credit…usually, in my experience, it’s a few writers and maybe an editor or two banging these things out around drinks at lunch.
BS or deliberate lies and deceit???
OK, I’ll bite….I think that no matter how one arrives at the methodology of what is the best city transit wise, and has an argument for or against it, that there is one inescapable conclusion that Portland has indeed been more active, and infinitely more successful, at getting the funds to achieve their objectives.
And if I’m reading this correctly, Seattle has more money, right? So, what gives?
And lets face it when it comes to Clunk vs. their light rail, they win so far. Just yesterday as I had to take Clunk from Rainier Beach to downtown with my bike, I cursed the innately stupid design of their bike rack while I simultaneously had to apologize to the guy sitting across from the said rack, all because one cannot NOT block the aisle and let someone sit opposite from my Stumpie on the rack. I hit him once accidentally, lightly fortunately in just trying to put my ride up.
Stupid, stupid,. and then some imo. At least Portland had the foresight to let cyclists enter the car and immediately “hook” their bikes up with minimal interference and no silly U-turn maneuver.
I understand their system is literally maxed out, surprise surprise. I know they don’t have all the solutions, but instead of posting about why Seattle isn’t included in the “top” tier we could be learning more tried and true lessons from them down south. Someone involved in the bicycle aspect of Clunk certainly wasn’t paying attention that day…PDX 1, SEA 0.
Friendly advice on the “Clunk” thing – just stop. It isn’t working for you. I actually agree with a lot of what you say about the bike racks, but my brain unconsciously files you in with the trolls and Seattle Times comment page Boondoggle! screamers when you keep dropping that line over and over.
Patrick, fair enough, I hear what you’re saying. but the sound, and name, fit unfortunately.
I confess I’ve been to the Times site, once possibly in the past ten months(serious) and have no clue as to the shenanigans that abound there. I have made only one or two comments there, ever.
My point is that we can learn a heck of a lot from other transit systems instead of learning the hard way. Yes, ST has many shortcomings in my book, but admittedly they do an adequate job in other areas; as well that some solutions are uniquely situated by only learning in ones own geographical region.
Plus, the most important piece to this of course is Seattle and the surrounding area needs to be higher on the list, no matter the methodology or which one. So, what does it take to get this town higher rankings?!
I’ve actually heard a lot of people say they like the racks on Link better than the ones on MAX because on MAX the bikes swing around and can get in a lot more people’s way than Link’s racks. Although, the best bike racks I’ve seen on light rail are surprisingly on San Jose’s VTA system. Their vehicles are almost exactly the same as ours, but in the center segment of the vehicle they took out half of the seats and replaced them with four bike racks, and it doesn’t appear that the bikes really get in anyones way.
Did you keep the list of cities ordered by households not in poverty without a car? That’d be interesting to see. (Though still not perfect, since it wouldn’t account for things like arbitrariness of city limits, is partially just an indication of student population, etc.)
I’ve got it, but was reluctant to get into it because it’s a total hack job. Nevertheless, of the 50 on the Wikipedia page, Cambridge, East LA, Louisville, Honolulu, and Berkeley didn’t have poverty data.
Seattle (12%) was beaten by New York (48%), Jersey City, Newark, Washington, Baltimore, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Yonkers, New Orleans, Chicago, and Elizabeth (12%), in that order.
There’s a bit of a natural break between us and New Haven, St. Louis, Atlanta, Paterson, and so on. LA is the lowest-ranked city that’s positive (0.4%), and 8 cities, including Detroit and Cleveland, have more poverty than they do carfree households.
Cambridge is guaranteed to be above us on that list; the car-free culture there extends well into the upper income brackets.
Berkeley’s income distribution is so wide that I couldn’t begin to estimate where it would fall with in-poverty households subtracted.
Re the arbitrariness of city limits, I’ve been wondering whether a better system would be to pick a density threshold, and to define a city as being all nearby census tracts with greater than that level of density, starting from the center city. That way, you’d be comparing apples with apples. You could also pick a second lower number for metropolitan areas, which would include nearby suburbs as well.
The census does this when designating urbanized areas. They pay no regard to incorporation boundaries; it’s all about density. Their standard is 1,000 people per square mile (ppsm), which is useful for the lower number; I think that a number in the range of 5,000-10,000 ppsm would be better for isolating the kind of areas that are dense enough to support high-quality public transit.
More generally, I think it would be nice if there was some sort of free, easy-to-use tool which would allow you to define complex places and then do census queries. That way, I could populate it with a list of all urbanized areas, and then do all sorts of queries about car ownership, commutes, etc. I know that commercial GIS software can do all this and more, but I’d like something simpler, since hobbyists like us probably don’t want to shell out real money for that. :)
Anyway, some interesting links with numbers and analysis:
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/ua/ua2k.txt
http://exurban.osu.edu/maps_ohio.htm
That’s actually how metro areas are defined, though not at a minimum density that’s very conducive to transit.
At least for the 2000 census, metro areas are defined county-by-county.
I checked, and the urbanized area population counts are consistently lower than the metropolitan area population counts. This makes sense; even in King County, there are several areas that couldn’t be considered urban by any definition.
Thanks for the honesty.
Portland is looking more and more like a sad example of throwing money at a problem and getting little if no results.
61.5 percent of Portlanders commute in SOVs.
This after it was selected as a bucket for billions in Federal funds to make it a showcase for light rail and other “transit”!
I would also ask how the “city” is defined. More and more population has spread to the metro area, the suburbs or the exurbian ring cities around the original downtown core — which may, as you say, be more “carfree” as a result of increasing impoverishment, not through any type of transit-lust.
“61.5 percent of Portlanders commute in SOVs”
And how many billions were invested to reach that result?
Illogical.
The argument is that “transit dollars” will get people out of cars despite previous investments in personal transit infrastructure.
If these dollars have no effect, for whatever reason, then they are not worth spending. Better to improve and augment the Personal Transit Systems with more appropriate technology — like taxis, shuttle buses, cars for poor people, fuel cell and electric stations, hourly Zip Car rentals, Texxi and Weeels social taxi cell phone applications….
Hard to compare 53 miles of LRT in the Portland region with tens of thousands of miles of streets and roads in the same region.
Jon,
I’m hesitant to compare the raw mileage of pavement with that of transit. Lots of local streets are built to very low standards (witness the “no vehicles over 6,000 lbs” signs you see on lots of developments), and are pretty much useless for any high-capacity use. And correspondingly, they are often built and/or maintained by private developers or HOAs.
But I think you make a very interesting point; it would be worth comparing the mileage of arterial streets (and better) with the mileage of transit. I’m fine with including mostly grade-separated corridors, even counting 3rd Ave in the transit camp. But I have no doubt that the road mileage will far, far, far exceed the transit mileage, even if you adjust the numbers by the percentage of people using each mode.
I actually agree with you in some ways. Despite the fact that it has a lot of light rail and its transit system is widely acclaimed by transit enthusiasts, Portland has a much lower transit modeshare than Seattle. As of 2009, Seattle had a transit modeshare of 19.5% while Portland had just 11.5%. Also, I can’t find the data to corroborate this, but I have heard that Portland’s total transit modeshare hasn’t changed significantly since their light rail system opened.
This doesn’t at all mean that transit or specifically light rail are bad and ineffective in general; however, it does mean that we shouldn’t just copy Portland as we expand our transit system. We should learn from what their system, along with other successful and unsuccessful systems around the world, does well and what it does badly.
Looks like Jarrett posted a couple articles he wrote with all this data down below.
portland began buildings its regional rail system a generation ago, seattle built outs its regional express bus system a generation ago and is now building its regional rail system. now portland needs to build out its regional express bus system. these are both important components to have on top of the basic urban bus system.
Portland’s lower transit modeshare probably has a lot to do with Seattle’s intensely developed CBD and highly concentrated employment with great transit access. The U District is the second largest employment center, also very transit connected. Downtown Portland is a wonderful place with great transit access, but I doubt it’s as much of a draw as Seattle’s big employment centers, per capita
…And I must attach to Jonathan Dubman’s point my usual reminder that “19.5%” is our peak-commute modeshare, and that it drops to ±pathetic% the rest of the time.
Portland’s mode-share remains much more consistent throughout the day, inasmuch as their system is set up to facilitate other uses than just getting to your CBD middle-management 9-to-5.
the geniuses here didnt do some digging to find out the methodology??
what criteriea is used to determine the ‘most’ transit?? is it seats per mile per capita??
what us transit system has the most transit?
Even if one could define it, “best transit agency” is very different from “best city to rely on transit,”……
wouldnt the best transit agency be the most reliable?? agency being a part of the city???
I’m glad the faulty methodology(is any was used at all) is being brought up. After all, try getting Portland MAX to take you home from a rock club at 2am like a Subway in NYC will.
Try getting BART in SF, the LA metro, the DC metro, MARTA in Atlanta, or any basically any non-NYC subway in the country (unless you happen to live on one of two lines in Chicago or a nearly irrelevant suburban line in Philly) to take you home from a rock club. The middle of the night is not the time where rapid transit is the most productive. (Though I admit it’d be nice to be able to take a train home from a late show)
Here is a better metric IMO…
Major US City Commute Patterns 2008 – % Commuting by Public Transit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USCommutePatterns2006.png
Count out the first 10 from right to left on the graph
Sure, but I’d argue there’s much more to transit than getting to work.
certainly, but i think this is a good metric. i would say those are a pretty good correlation of the most transit centric cities and in that order too. these also happen to be great urban major cities of the US.
Thanks for the link to my posts on this. Should you wish to pile further on my beloved hometown of Portland, you might compare Seattle to these:
http://www.humantransit.org/2010/01/portland-a-challenging-chart.html
http://www.humantransit.org/2010/01/portland-another-challenging-chart.html
Seattle also has much higher transit mode share to downtown than Portland, and I believe it did even before Link was opened.
Oh, and don’t forget this: http://www.humantransit.org/2010/01/portland-is-parking-the-problem.html
If they’re refusing to provide methodology and analysis proves there is little fact involved, I wonder if someone was paid off to list who they did how they did. MAX’s usefulness wanes as you need to travel farther and farther away from it, and many of TriMet’s bus routes are served by 20-year-old buses with threadbare plastic seats, lack air conditioning, and were manufactured by a company that went out of business years ago (Flxible). TriMet is not as transparent as they could be, and many times their answer for things is “we have to do this.”
I doubt it was malignant or corrupt. They seem to have gone for cities with recent PR value in some cases, i.e. reputation rather than actual strength of system, ridership, mode share, experience, etc.
The article does say, though, that a few of these places got high on the list because of great safety on their transit system (which sounds like it means crashes and fires and such, not crime). I guess they weighted that equally with ridership and investment, which is totally ridiculous considering that even if one place has 10 times the number of actually dangerous safety incidents as another, it still happens in an extremely tiny number of cases.
Spent last Friday afternoon in Portland- first Talgo south, last one north. Always a nice trip. Have been visiting Portland pretty regularly since I came out here thirty years ago, and have watched light rail and streetcar develop there.
It’s not completely fair to compare MAX and the Portland Streetcar with transit in Seattle. Downtown Portland is flat for eighteen blocks between the river and the hill with the zoo on top, and wide crossways too. They also inherited miles of existing rail right-of-way.
But every time I’m there, it just seems like whoever is in charge there understands better how to make a city beautiful and comfortable than is the case in Seattle.
I wonder if someone who’s lived in Portland any length of time could give me some perspective. Am I right that Seattle’s economy has been the stronger of the two for a long time. I’m not after who’s “best”- but very curious what we need to do better.
Mark Dublin
And in addition, since I was there last, they’ve added a tall building, totally “green” technically, mixed apartment and office, with four wind turbines on top. Look up “Indigo”. Anybody making the case for greater density in Downtown Seattle needs to take the train down and see it.
Mark Dublin
What did you expect from US News? Their best colleges list that they release every year is always under scrutiny…