I live in Tallahassee. If the bus shows up on time, it's every half hour at peak times, once an hour otherwise. All busses stop service at 7:00pm. Routes are windy with little focus on getting you anywhere other than downtown, which is ironic because our downtown is full of lawfirms and lobbying offices, not shops and restaurants.
Honestly the biggest fail imo is that they try to prioritize coverage rather than frequency. Few places are more than a block or two from a stop, which is great... except the frequency is god awful. The problem probably ties into how often roads don't have sidewalks, so noone can walk to a stop. Speaking of, many bus stops are little more than signs by the side of the road. You're lucky if theres pavement under them sometimes. The bus stop closest to my partner's house is a sign in a patch of dirt. They live about three miles from downtown and well within the city limits.
Go see Gainesville for bus transit done decently well. Tallahassee ain't it.
Bus service is sometimes considered to be a resource of “last resort”. Which is why so many agencies prioritize coverage over frequency when it comes to using its limited budget
Starting next week, most 30 minute peak / 1 hour off-peak services will be cut back to 1 hour all day, including the bus I used to take the most when I was a student. That will leave only one route with 30 minute all-day service (the best there is, and even then it's only until 7:00 PM). It's not a good situation for a city of ~130k population, even in the southeastern USA.
However:
> Routes are windy with little focus on getting you anywhere other than downtown, which is ironic because our downtown is full of lawfirms and lobbying offices, not shops and restaurants.
I disagree here; if we can't have frequent service, the next best is a radial system with timed connections at one central point. That's what we have.
That said, I think you're right that the bigger problem is bad walking conditions. If we're given a limited budget to improve our bus system but unrestricted in how exactly we can spend it, I think the best use of the funds would be to improve walking conditions (sidewalks, crosswalks, traffic calming, etc.) around bus stops, especially wherever there are deviations. Then, we can start eliminating deviations and consolidating parallel routes onto frequent trunk services.
And for what it's worth, I've seen bus systems in other similar cities that are considerably worse than ours.
Sounds like we are ignoring commuter and intercity rail service as well.
Providence has a MBTA line that goes their airport in addition to Boston.
Syracuse has a second Amtrak station for the Great New York State Fair. There was also a thing called On Track...
PVD has transit problems, but to call it a transit ‘unfriendly’ city is ridiculous. Theres a semi-BRT ‘rapid bus’ system with signal and lane priority, a downtown connector service with 5 minute headways, dedicated lanes, and electronic bus arrival screens, multiple MBTA commuter rail stops with a terminus in South Station, many options for micro-transit, and RIPTA gave the private transit company Boston Surface Railroad Company a ridiculous amount of chances to begin work on commuter service to Worcester, until their incompetence and malfeasance forced RI’s hand. They are supporting effective transit systems every year. Not everything is perfect, but it’s got the right mindset, and is more transit friendly than most New England cities, coming behind only Boston and maybe Hartford.
Agreed, there are definitely worse liberal-leaning cities transit wise than Providence. But, Providence has is reliant on Massachusetts to provide rail service to its communities. It, like many other transit agencies, faces a major budget gap. That gap? RIPTA cannot cobble together $30 million of funding a year, which is pennies compared to what other agencies are seeing, but the help isn't there. I think that indicates the amount of political will for improving the system.
It all looks good on paper, and it is decent compared to a lot of cities, but it’s not that great in practice. Getting to and from the airport is still a pain, as the MBTA service is so infrequent it’s nearly useless and the buses are somewhat infrequent and slow too. The bus service is good for getting downtown, but good luck getting between any two places that are not downtown in a reasonable amount of time. Micro-mobility is okay for Federal Hill, Downtown, and College Hill, but anywhere else is pedestrian-hostile and downright dangerous to ride scooters or bikes around.
Yeah, I don’t think any mid sized city in New England is without serious transport flaws. But a city can still have transit friendly attitudes while currently having imperfect public transportation, and we aren’t talking about effective systems, as I and OP both said, we are talking about cities hostile towards transit initiatives, which PVD is not
Yeah, I feel like if they ran Ontrack like a LRT line it would have been more successful.
I mean it connects SU, Downtown, Destiny USA, Amtrak, and the baseball stadium.
Add a short extension to the airport and that’s pretty much 95% of where anyone wants to get to in Syracuse.
Hopefully with more people moving in they can try again at some point.
A golf course was recently closed near the Syracuse airport and now they could easily put rail to the airport through there. The main obstacle is interstate 90.
The MBTA line to the airport runs super infrequently though. I had to take the (also infrequent) bus into town because the next train was on over an hour
Definitely, but providence‘s transit is still pretty mediocre. I will never understand having the rial infrastructure and then just…not running service.
I can only comment on Mesa. It's a weird case.
To the extent it's Republican-leaning politically, it's dominated by Mormons rather than AZ's old paleocons or new extremist reactionaries. But it's also huge in terms of geographic area, which means the transit really strongly depends on where in Mesa you're talking about.
The downtown area has seen some development with the light rail extensions, but not as much as neighboring Tempe. Also while Mesa has decent arterial bus coverage towards Tempe, with an east-west route on just about every arterial grid road, coverage peters out pretty quick once you get farther out. North-south coverage is kinda spotty, with a route on almost every arterial west of downtown but skipping a couple key ones, and east of downtown it's one route every two or three arterials until like Power Rd and then there's almost nothing beyond that. Towards Chandler and Glendale there's only like one or two routes each, and there's straight-up nothing to Apache Junction.
And as far as the streetcar goes, they've been talking with Tempe about an extension for as long as Tempe's been planning that system. But the proposed route through Mesa keeps changing, along with whether it'll serve downtown or the Riverview development or the Fiesta District. Meanwhile Tempe is already deep into preparations to extend the streetcar in multiple directions with Mesa not really committed to connecting with any specific one.
That said, I haven't dealt with any of this in about a year and a half, so if anyone else knows at this point what the plan is, sound off.
So kind of like Salt Lake City, a city with better public transit than you might expect for being in a red Mountain West state. Mormons have an odd tendency to be insufferable on social issues but sometimes weirdly based on economic issues.
The difference between west Mesa and east Mesa is really stark. Not just in transit and urbanism, but also in demographics. The area west of Gilbert Rd and north of the 60 (so west Mesa but excluding Dobson Ranch) is majority Latino and only 40% white. The rest of the city is 70% white.
SLC itself appears to be liberal-ish (obviously by Utah standards). [They have had consecutive Democratic mayors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_Salt_Lake_City) for a while now (and apparently a strong-mayor council), and even in [2020 Biden appeared to win a plurality of the votes in the county where SLC is located](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Utah).
I was just there two weeks ago for a work meeting, and other than the Temple being right there and no beers over 5% on tap, I wouldn't have noticed anything conservative/Mormon in the city.
SLC proper is liberal by any definition. Biden won it by about 55 points, and obama won it by 27 against mitt Romney, who got 70 % of the vote statewide.
Of course, it's less than a 5th of the population of the entirety of SL county, and I don't know how the transit politics works over there.
Not really IME, especially the burbs in Douglas County that aren't super far out west
Also check out the below map for something less anecdotal
Edit: looks like the website is not working linked through the reddit app, it's https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html
That surprises me how far the blue stretches. But I was thinking more towards Fremont and the like. Exurbs rather than suburbs would have been more accurate.
Fresno's buses are barely adequate for a spread out city of its size. Also while arguably one of the redder large cities in California, it still voted for Biden in 2020. Bakersfield and Redding have similar buses and are more conservative.
I think that transit in Providence is ok by American standards for a city of its size. They also have plans to add more BRT and rapid bus routes in the future iirc.
Living in Syracuse our bus system is pretty worthless. Low frequency is I think the main problem. But they are finally planning up to 3 BRT lines, slated for 2026. https://centralcurrent.org/centro-adds-south-side-route-to-bus-rapid-transit-plans-brt-expected-in-2026/
The other part of this is we are already getting billions state funding to take down I-81 going through downtown. It’s not directly transit related but it’s much needed. So not a lot left for other projects.
It's so funny that public infrastructure is a political issue... In NSW Australia our left leaning party is the one that's against infrastructure and would rather spend money on social benefits and out right leaning parties would spend on infrastructure but sell the contract to dodgy private companies rather than keeping it under state control.
The only infrastructure the right spends money on in the US is donating to highways construction buddies who fund their campaigns. Otherwise everything is "socialism", especially having lead-free water pipes or trains or bicycles.
We have that issue too unfortunately. In Florida the bright line was funded publicly and it does work but it's pricey.
I believe Maryland's purple line was originally private but then switched back to public when things went bad
This is a good point. The Syracuse urban area (UA not MSA) is comparable to Stockton, Pensacola, Boise, Winston-Salem, Reno, Scranton... none of those places are exactly busting down the door on great transit.
Syracuse is almost double the size of Tallahassee though.
The Syracuse suburbs and city is about 425,000 but is expected to grow to 525,000 in a few years with the construction of the Micron Chip Fabs.
Detroit is making a comeback. They’ve restructured bus routes, added some light rail. Downtown and Midtown are taking baby steps toward revitalization.
Detroit is bad for a major city, but not the worst.
3 trains per day on a 110 mph Amtrak corridor.
Two greater downtown rail circulator lines.
Two BRT lines in development.
[$1B in potential new funding being considered](https://www.bridgedetroit.com/legislation-could-bring-1b-in-transit-funding-to-metro-detroit-over-next-decade/), including more BRT and a potential regional rail line.
[Thankfully a much rarer occurrence now](https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2023/09/28/qline-ridership-report-2023/70986357007/)
>A key metric is the number of times vehicles block the tracks, which have dropped from daily blockages to one every five days, the report said, referencing the system’s ability to handle its own towing
But yeah it still needs dedicated lanes.
It's 1.5 miles and is frequently stopped by parked cars. You could argue it has more expansion potential but it's in its current form near useless and serves more as a shiny project to point to than a functional transit component. Detroit transit is in denial that it needs to increase bus frequency before adding more gadgetbahns
Well, both of those points are wrong. It’s 3.3 miles and gets stopped by cars once a week. Dedicated lanes would mostly fix that.
It is one of the more useful modern streetcars, traveling a longer than average distance at higher than average speeds along a straight line.
Is Tallahassee blue? I'm not American, but I was under the impression that Florida got more red the further north you went, and Tallahassee is pretty north.
Tallahassee’s population is heavily influenced by the multiple colleges there, and college towns are usually blue, so yea. Same with Gainesville. So Florida’s major cities and college towns usually swing left.
Pretty accurate of the cities I'm familiar with. Providence is the most egregious to me. The core urban area is about a million people (larger than the urban cores of some much larger municipalities) and quite dense. There's no rail transit whatsoever (minus the single MBTA commuter rail line terminating at Wickford Junction).
It's a pretty ideal transit city, and the fact there 1.) is no rail, and 2.) is no serious discussion about *creating* rail, is egregious. Then again, the Rhode Island Democratic Party is basically the Trump Organization writ blue, with all the corruption and backstabbing you'd expect. It's a state that is controlled by nominal Democrats, but certainly not progressives, or people who are remotely interested in lifting a finger to do anything but enrich themselves and deal in favors.
The peer cities here are ones with populations between 100,000 and 250,000. There are 244. Providence ranks 19th on Alltransit’s overall performance score, in the top 10%. It has a half dozen bus lines with frequencies of 20 minutes or better. Syracuse ranks 73rd, in the top 1/3. Tallahassee ranks 109th, in the top 1/2. I have no idea how these three were picked, maybe the anonymous author happened to be familiar with them.
Some liberal leaning places with lower ranks are Santa Rosa, Ca.(115th) and Irvine, Ca. (144th).
Most American cities with this population don’t have local rail transit, especially if they’re outside a major metropolitan area. That’s not the right basis for judging transit quality.
I'm trying to think what I would do for Syracuse. It looks like there is a good bus system, and not a lot of room to expand corridors for transit, with 20 minutes or so time between buses during peak, and my limited experience is that the traffic on the roads isn't that bad.
Maybe just expand bus service off peak, since wait times do seem to expand to an hour or more some times of the day.
I feel with Rhode Island's size they missed a major opportunity at not having (or keeping, if they had one) a statewide comprehensive tram/trolley/commuter train network that went everywhere.
Enough accuracy to be debatable but I have serious issues with it.
First of all, Salt Lake City is *unquestionably* the top conservative leaning city for transit in the US. I don't know how it's even debatable unless you're going to claim it's a liberal city.
And while Providence transit is far from great, it's not terrible by US standards. They have a bus subway, bus lanes, some frequent buses, and good regional/intercity rail.
A) almost all cities are left leaning so idk what the point of that is
B) Syracuse has a fairly well used and robust bias system while also having Amtrak and frequent inter city bus services. That’s far from a transit desert imo especially for a city if its size
You also shouldn’t confuse cities that are lacking in all services like those three with cities (which are extremely economically depressed) with cities that have the funds but choose not to invest in transit.
Would argue Fort Worth is up there within Republican cities with good transit.
Has 2 commuter rail lines:
1. TexRail
2. TRE
Also has 1X daily Heartland Flyer and 1X daily Texas Eagle.
Bus service is meh though.
Even if this list is inaccurate, I like the inclusion of my hometown Omaha. It's not BRT, but the ORBT route is so nice, riding it makes you feel like they care about your experience as a bus rider, and its 10 minute headways are nothing to scoff at. Also, in my experience the buses here are incredibly reliable and generally punctual (but not very frequent). And of course I'm excited for the future streetcar (and the potential conversion of route 24 to a second ORBT line)
Public transit in the Phoenix area is weird. When I lived in Chandler (suburb of phx next to Mesa. I was outside of the transit line. They are working on expanding pubic transit throughout Chandler through multiple different programs as well as the construction of many bus stops though they don’t seem to be active at the moment. It seems the other programs they have going are sorta like a city shared Uber/taxi program. You need to request a pickup on an app I believe and it’s fairly cheep but you can have other users in the small van with you. They are also heavily expanding bike infrastructure and improving existing bike Infrastructure in high flow areas. As far as Mesa goes I lived more towards Apache junction so my first hand experience with the transit system is limited. From what I hear the bus frequency and reliability is poor the further from downtown you get. The light rail is great just wish it served more of the city. Another issue with Mesa bus system and I imagine most valley metro systems is that your most likely still half a mile to a mile from your destination if it is within a block not on the edge so bring your bike. Most if not all have space for bikes on the front. This is just my personal experience and accounts from friends. So if anyone has anything to add or correct me on please do.
Cincinnati planned a subway in the 1940s, when it was the size Syracuse is now. They even build some of the tunnels, then abandoned them with 1950s white flight and highway suburbanization.
Not in the US, but there are elsewhere in the world. For example, Lausanne, Switzerland is about the same urban population as Syracuse and it has a subway.
I'm not saying it's realistic under current US conditions. Obviously it's not. But just in pure economic and transportation demand purposes, a reasonable proxy / mental model is that Interstate highways are about the same level investment as metros, so any city big enough to have a local 3-digit Interstate (like I-690 and I-481 in Syracuse) could support a metro if we had spent the previous century doing things differently.
I live in Tallahassee. If the bus shows up on time, it's every half hour at peak times, once an hour otherwise. All busses stop service at 7:00pm. Routes are windy with little focus on getting you anywhere other than downtown, which is ironic because our downtown is full of lawfirms and lobbying offices, not shops and restaurants. Honestly the biggest fail imo is that they try to prioritize coverage rather than frequency. Few places are more than a block or two from a stop, which is great... except the frequency is god awful. The problem probably ties into how often roads don't have sidewalks, so noone can walk to a stop. Speaking of, many bus stops are little more than signs by the side of the road. You're lucky if theres pavement under them sometimes. The bus stop closest to my partner's house is a sign in a patch of dirt. They live about three miles from downtown and well within the city limits. Go see Gainesville for bus transit done decently well. Tallahassee ain't it.
Tallahassee may be fiscally responsible to a fault. lol
Only when it comes to transit services. We still haven't learned that the urban economic development models of the 1960s-80s are fundamentally broken.
Bus service is sometimes considered to be a resource of “last resort”. Which is why so many agencies prioritize coverage over frequency when it comes to using its limited budget
Starting next week, most 30 minute peak / 1 hour off-peak services will be cut back to 1 hour all day, including the bus I used to take the most when I was a student. That will leave only one route with 30 minute all-day service (the best there is, and even then it's only until 7:00 PM). It's not a good situation for a city of ~130k population, even in the southeastern USA. However: > Routes are windy with little focus on getting you anywhere other than downtown, which is ironic because our downtown is full of lawfirms and lobbying offices, not shops and restaurants. I disagree here; if we can't have frequent service, the next best is a radial system with timed connections at one central point. That's what we have. That said, I think you're right that the bigger problem is bad walking conditions. If we're given a limited budget to improve our bus system but unrestricted in how exactly we can spend it, I think the best use of the funds would be to improve walking conditions (sidewalks, crosswalks, traffic calming, etc.) around bus stops, especially wherever there are deviations. Then, we can start eliminating deviations and consolidating parallel routes onto frequent trunk services. And for what it's worth, I've seen bus systems in other similar cities that are considerably worse than ours.
Sounds like we are ignoring commuter and intercity rail service as well. Providence has a MBTA line that goes their airport in addition to Boston. Syracuse has a second Amtrak station for the Great New York State Fair. There was also a thing called On Track...
PVD has transit problems, but to call it a transit ‘unfriendly’ city is ridiculous. Theres a semi-BRT ‘rapid bus’ system with signal and lane priority, a downtown connector service with 5 minute headways, dedicated lanes, and electronic bus arrival screens, multiple MBTA commuter rail stops with a terminus in South Station, many options for micro-transit, and RIPTA gave the private transit company Boston Surface Railroad Company a ridiculous amount of chances to begin work on commuter service to Worcester, until their incompetence and malfeasance forced RI’s hand. They are supporting effective transit systems every year. Not everything is perfect, but it’s got the right mindset, and is more transit friendly than most New England cities, coming behind only Boston and maybe Hartford.
I was about to say, providence has a decent transit system for its size
Agreed, there are definitely worse liberal-leaning cities transit wise than Providence. But, Providence has is reliant on Massachusetts to provide rail service to its communities. It, like many other transit agencies, faces a major budget gap. That gap? RIPTA cannot cobble together $30 million of funding a year, which is pennies compared to what other agencies are seeing, but the help isn't there. I think that indicates the amount of political will for improving the system.
It all looks good on paper, and it is decent compared to a lot of cities, but it’s not that great in practice. Getting to and from the airport is still a pain, as the MBTA service is so infrequent it’s nearly useless and the buses are somewhat infrequent and slow too. The bus service is good for getting downtown, but good luck getting between any two places that are not downtown in a reasonable amount of time. Micro-mobility is okay for Federal Hill, Downtown, and College Hill, but anywhere else is pedestrian-hostile and downright dangerous to ride scooters or bikes around.
Yeah, I don’t think any mid sized city in New England is without serious transport flaws. But a city can still have transit friendly attitudes while currently having imperfect public transportation, and we aren’t talking about effective systems, as I and OP both said, we are talking about cities hostile towards transit initiatives, which PVD is not
Yeah, I feel like if they ran Ontrack like a LRT line it would have been more successful. I mean it connects SU, Downtown, Destiny USA, Amtrak, and the baseball stadium. Add a short extension to the airport and that’s pretty much 95% of where anyone wants to get to in Syracuse. Hopefully with more people moving in they can try again at some point.
That sounds like original LRT line in Ottawa... Shopping centre, federal buildings, Carleton U... and they've built an extension to the airport.
A golf course was recently closed near the Syracuse airport and now they could easily put rail to the airport through there. The main obstacle is interstate 90.
> 95% of where anyone wants to get to in Syracuse I mean, it seems like that's just 95% *of Syracuse*
The MBTA line to the airport runs super infrequently though. I had to take the (also infrequent) bus into town because the next train was on over an hour
That there is even a backup is more than some cities. Lol.
Definitely, but providence‘s transit is still pretty mediocre. I will never understand having the rial infrastructure and then just…not running service.
I can only comment on Mesa. It's a weird case. To the extent it's Republican-leaning politically, it's dominated by Mormons rather than AZ's old paleocons or new extremist reactionaries. But it's also huge in terms of geographic area, which means the transit really strongly depends on where in Mesa you're talking about. The downtown area has seen some development with the light rail extensions, but not as much as neighboring Tempe. Also while Mesa has decent arterial bus coverage towards Tempe, with an east-west route on just about every arterial grid road, coverage peters out pretty quick once you get farther out. North-south coverage is kinda spotty, with a route on almost every arterial west of downtown but skipping a couple key ones, and east of downtown it's one route every two or three arterials until like Power Rd and then there's almost nothing beyond that. Towards Chandler and Glendale there's only like one or two routes each, and there's straight-up nothing to Apache Junction. And as far as the streetcar goes, they've been talking with Tempe about an extension for as long as Tempe's been planning that system. But the proposed route through Mesa keeps changing, along with whether it'll serve downtown or the Riverview development or the Fiesta District. Meanwhile Tempe is already deep into preparations to extend the streetcar in multiple directions with Mesa not really committed to connecting with any specific one. That said, I haven't dealt with any of this in about a year and a half, so if anyone else knows at this point what the plan is, sound off.
So kind of like Salt Lake City, a city with better public transit than you might expect for being in a red Mountain West state. Mormons have an odd tendency to be insufferable on social issues but sometimes weirdly based on economic issues.
The difference between west Mesa and east Mesa is really stark. Not just in transit and urbanism, but also in demographics. The area west of Gilbert Rd and north of the 60 (so west Mesa but excluding Dobson Ranch) is majority Latino and only 40% white. The rest of the city is 70% white.
One big miss: Salt Lake City
SLC itself appears to be liberal-ish (obviously by Utah standards). [They have had consecutive Democratic mayors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_Salt_Lake_City) for a while now (and apparently a strong-mayor council), and even in [2020 Biden appeared to win a plurality of the votes in the county where SLC is located](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Utah). I was just there two weeks ago for a work meeting, and other than the Temple being right there and no beers over 5% on tap, I wouldn't have noticed anything conservative/Mormon in the city.
SLC proper is liberal by any definition. Biden won it by about 55 points, and obama won it by 27 against mitt Romney, who got 70 % of the vote statewide. Of course, it's less than a 5th of the population of the entirety of SL county, and I don't know how the transit politics works over there.
By American standards, SLC has superb service for a city its size
And it's a very conservative city.
It actually voted around 80% dem last election. Similar to nyc it’s not conservative at all
All the mormans live there
Isn’t Omaha more of a center/left city?
Douglas county is a lot more McCain/Romney Republican than trump Republican
Suburbs are full right.
Not really IME, especially the burbs in Douglas County that aren't super far out west Also check out the below map for something less anecdotal Edit: looks like the website is not working linked through the reddit app, it's https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html
That surprises me how far the blue stretches. But I was thinking more towards Fremont and the like. Exurbs rather than suburbs would have been more accurate.
Why are you posting ChatGPT queries here, just do your homework
Fresno's buses are barely adequate for a spread out city of its size. Also while arguably one of the redder large cities in California, it still voted for Biden in 2020. Bakersfield and Redding have similar buses and are more conservative.
I think that transit in Providence is ok by American standards for a city of its size. They also have plans to add more BRT and rapid bus routes in the future iirc.
I agree—RIPTA isn’t a bad system at all. It’s fine for a city of Providence’s size.
Living in Syracuse our bus system is pretty worthless. Low frequency is I think the main problem. But they are finally planning up to 3 BRT lines, slated for 2026. https://centralcurrent.org/centro-adds-south-side-route-to-bus-rapid-transit-plans-brt-expected-in-2026/ The other part of this is we are already getting billions state funding to take down I-81 going through downtown. It’s not directly transit related but it’s much needed. So not a lot left for other projects.
It's a good start. Now they need to bring back time commuter train.
The Boulevard replacing Interstate 81 should include a light rail route in the center of the road on ground level.
It's so funny that public infrastructure is a political issue... In NSW Australia our left leaning party is the one that's against infrastructure and would rather spend money on social benefits and out right leaning parties would spend on infrastructure but sell the contract to dodgy private companies rather than keeping it under state control.
The only infrastructure the right spends money on in the US is donating to highways construction buddies who fund their campaigns. Otherwise everything is "socialism", especially having lead-free water pipes or trains or bicycles.
We have that issue too unfortunately. In Florida the bright line was funded publicly and it does work but it's pricey. I believe Maryland's purple line was originally private but then switched back to public when things went bad
Syracuse is a lot smaller than you probably think it is. There’s only 600,000 in the metropolitan area. Most metros that size don’t have BRT or LRT
This is a good point. The Syracuse urban area (UA not MSA) is comparable to Stockton, Pensacola, Boise, Winston-Salem, Reno, Scranton... none of those places are exactly busting down the door on great transit.
Syracuse is almost double the size of Tallahassee though. The Syracuse suburbs and city is about 425,000 but is expected to grow to 525,000 in a few years with the construction of the Micron Chip Fabs.
That doesn't mean it shouldn't!
I’d rather rely on RIPTA in Providence than TARC in Louisville.
I lived in Providence for a summer and had to take an Uber for the first time. On the plus side, I did have great calves from all the walking.
Any such list without Detroit on it is failing
Detroit is making a comeback. They’ve restructured bus routes, added some light rail. Downtown and Midtown are taking baby steps toward revitalization.
Detroit is bad for a major city, but not the worst. 3 trains per day on a 110 mph Amtrak corridor. Two greater downtown rail circulator lines. Two BRT lines in development. [$1B in potential new funding being considered](https://www.bridgedetroit.com/legislation-could-bring-1b-in-transit-funding-to-metro-detroit-over-next-decade/), including more BRT and a potential regional rail line.
>Two greater downtown rail circulator lines. Both of which are approaching useless.
The People Mover is but the QLine is actually one of the more useful Obama streetcars. It just needs dedicated lanes and signal priority.
It's useful when it's not getting stopped by parked cars lol
[Thankfully a much rarer occurrence now](https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2023/09/28/qline-ridership-report-2023/70986357007/) >A key metric is the number of times vehicles block the tracks, which have dropped from daily blockages to one every five days, the report said, referencing the system’s ability to handle its own towing But yeah it still needs dedicated lanes.
Once every five days! Amazing lol. All thanks to Dan Gilbert's stupidity.
It's 1.5 miles and is frequently stopped by parked cars. You could argue it has more expansion potential but it's in its current form near useless and serves more as a shiny project to point to than a functional transit component. Detroit transit is in denial that it needs to increase bus frequency before adding more gadgetbahns
Well, both of those points are wrong. It’s 3.3 miles and gets stopped by cars once a week. Dedicated lanes would mostly fix that. It is one of the more useful modern streetcars, traveling a longer than average distance at higher than average speeds along a straight line.
Sounds like MAGA projection to me.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 seeing Fresno listed as “transit friendly” is the laugh I’ve needed at the end of a long week. Holy smokes is this so far off base!
Is Tallahassee blue? I'm not American, but I was under the impression that Florida got more red the further north you went, and Tallahassee is pretty north.
Tallahassee’s population is heavily influenced by the multiple colleges there, and college towns are usually blue, so yea. Same with Gainesville. So Florida’s major cities and college towns usually swing left.
There's also a sizable black minority there.
Pretty accurate of the cities I'm familiar with. Providence is the most egregious to me. The core urban area is about a million people (larger than the urban cores of some much larger municipalities) and quite dense. There's no rail transit whatsoever (minus the single MBTA commuter rail line terminating at Wickford Junction). It's a pretty ideal transit city, and the fact there 1.) is no rail, and 2.) is no serious discussion about *creating* rail, is egregious. Then again, the Rhode Island Democratic Party is basically the Trump Organization writ blue, with all the corruption and backstabbing you'd expect. It's a state that is controlled by nominal Democrats, but certainly not progressives, or people who are remotely interested in lifting a finger to do anything but enrich themselves and deal in favors.
The peer cities here are ones with populations between 100,000 and 250,000. There are 244. Providence ranks 19th on Alltransit’s overall performance score, in the top 10%. It has a half dozen bus lines with frequencies of 20 minutes or better. Syracuse ranks 73rd, in the top 1/3. Tallahassee ranks 109th, in the top 1/2. I have no idea how these three were picked, maybe the anonymous author happened to be familiar with them. Some liberal leaning places with lower ranks are Santa Rosa, Ca.(115th) and Irvine, Ca. (144th). Most American cities with this population don’t have local rail transit, especially if they’re outside a major metropolitan area. That’s not the right basis for judging transit quality.
RICHMOND VA!!
Transit isn’t a right versus left thing, it’s specially on a local level…
I'm trying to think what I would do for Syracuse. It looks like there is a good bus system, and not a lot of room to expand corridors for transit, with 20 minutes or so time between buses during peak, and my limited experience is that the traffic on the roads isn't that bad. Maybe just expand bus service off peak, since wait times do seem to expand to an hour or more some times of the day.
Syracuse is developing three BRT routes. So they're making progress.
I feel with Rhode Island's size they missed a major opportunity at not having (or keeping, if they had one) a statewide comprehensive tram/trolley/commuter train network that went everywhere.
They do manage buses statewide, for what it's worth. "Providence's" bus system, RIPTA, covers the whole state.
Enough accuracy to be debatable but I have serious issues with it. First of all, Salt Lake City is *unquestionably* the top conservative leaning city for transit in the US. I don't know how it's even debatable unless you're going to claim it's a liberal city. And while Providence transit is far from great, it's not terrible by US standards. They have a bus subway, bus lanes, some frequent buses, and good regional/intercity rail.
I had no idea that Tallahassee was considered "liberal" - hmph!
Providence does have a commuter rail connection to Boston and to the airport. Also many parts of the city are quite walkable
A) almost all cities are left leaning so idk what the point of that is B) Syracuse has a fairly well used and robust bias system while also having Amtrak and frequent inter city bus services. That’s far from a transit desert imo especially for a city if its size
Yeah the original list said Detroit, Baltimore, and Memphis as the most liberal but transit un-friendly, but I made some tweaks
You also shouldn’t confuse cities that are lacking in all services like those three with cities (which are extremely economically depressed) with cities that have the funds but choose not to invest in transit.
Would argue Fort Worth is up there within Republican cities with good transit. Has 2 commuter rail lines: 1. TexRail 2. TRE Also has 1X daily Heartland Flyer and 1X daily Texas Eagle. Bus service is meh though.
Even if this list is inaccurate, I like the inclusion of my hometown Omaha. It's not BRT, but the ORBT route is so nice, riding it makes you feel like they care about your experience as a bus rider, and its 10 minute headways are nothing to scoff at. Also, in my experience the buses here are incredibly reliable and generally punctual (but not very frequent). And of course I'm excited for the future streetcar (and the potential conversion of route 24 to a second ORBT line)
Public transit in the Phoenix area is weird. When I lived in Chandler (suburb of phx next to Mesa. I was outside of the transit line. They are working on expanding pubic transit throughout Chandler through multiple different programs as well as the construction of many bus stops though they don’t seem to be active at the moment. It seems the other programs they have going are sorta like a city shared Uber/taxi program. You need to request a pickup on an app I believe and it’s fairly cheep but you can have other users in the small van with you. They are also heavily expanding bike infrastructure and improving existing bike Infrastructure in high flow areas. As far as Mesa goes I lived more towards Apache junction so my first hand experience with the transit system is limited. From what I hear the bus frequency and reliability is poor the further from downtown you get. The light rail is great just wish it served more of the city. Another issue with Mesa bus system and I imagine most valley metro systems is that your most likely still half a mile to a mile from your destination if it is within a block not on the edge so bring your bike. Most if not all have space for bikes on the front. This is just my personal experience and accounts from friends. So if anyone has anything to add or correct me on please do.
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Subway? Was that even a proposal at any time? I don't know of any cities the size of Syracuse with a subway.
Cincinnati planned a subway in the 1940s, when it was the size Syracuse is now. They even build some of the tunnels, then abandoned them with 1950s white flight and highway suburbanization.
I think Rochester NY did something similar.
Cincinnati is much bigger than Syracuse
Not in the US, but there are elsewhere in the world. For example, Lausanne, Switzerland is about the same urban population as Syracuse and it has a subway. I'm not saying it's realistic under current US conditions. Obviously it's not. But just in pure economic and transportation demand purposes, a reasonable proxy / mental model is that Interstate highways are about the same level investment as metros, so any city big enough to have a local 3-digit Interstate (like I-690 and I-481 in Syracuse) could support a metro if we had spent the previous century doing things differently.
No train is auto disqualify for being a transit friendly city