Los Angeles is widely reviled as the city in which no one walks. But Los Angeles is not the most car dependent city according to this data:
Via Matthew Yglesias.
Comments
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WanderingOak
The statistics for DC are probably skewed high, because it doesn’t consider the suburbs which lie outside of the Beltway where the Metro does not reach. Many of the people who work in the Northern Virginia suburbs around DC commute from Richmond VA, or the Shenandoah Valley, communities where there is no public transportation linking them to their workplace.
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jfruh
If they’re skewed, they’re skewed for all the circles, though, because as near as I can tell based on their relative sizes, all of these are based on city limits rather than metro area population. I too would really like to see the numbers for metropolitan areas, which would be more meaningful.
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jfruh
I’ve seen this chart before, and one of the things I found most intriguing about it is how low the numbers are for Portland, which is considered sort of a New Urbanist transit nirvana in transit-geeky circles (and I consider myself a transit geek). Meanwhile, Baltimore, where I live, is largely considered a missed transit opportunity, someplace where (conventional wisdom has it) “nobody” takes transit. Yet we can see that Baltimore’s transit use is significantly higher than Portland’s! I do think (as Yglesias implies in his post) that part of the disconnect in perception is racial — Portland is an overwhelmingly white city where relatively large numbers of whites ride the bus or train; in Baltimore, a majority black city, I’m often the only white person on the bus when I ride. Transit geeks being largely white (again, in my experinece), there’s this sort of blindness, this sort of “oh, nobody I know rides the bus” that creeps in.
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thewhatifgirl
Yeah, I was surprised to note the relatively low use in Seattle, too. But that is a very interesting speculation; I wouldn’t be surprised if you were right.
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a
Portland has a lot of bicyclists, who don’t get counted in “public transportation.” If you had a category for public transportation plus bicyclists and walkers, then Portland would probably surpass Baltimore.
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a
Come on, why would you use same nick name as me, “a”? Perhaps this is unintentional but I would wish that you could use some other pseudonym so people would not confuse us.
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A
I’ve posted on this site before under “a.” Maybe you’re using my nickname. ;P
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Jonathan
Perhaps this is also a factor in the OP indicating surprise at how much public transportation use there is in L.A. (or that it’s not as bad as one might think).
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Jonathan
As someone who lives in OKC, let me tell you that chart understates the problem here greatly. After WWII, the city planners decided to make OKC the largest city, geographically, in the nation. It’s currently somewhere at 3rd to 5th largest, geographically (or at least it was last time I checked). Now this means OKC has such horrible urban sprawl that livestock is actually raised inside the city limits. Seriously, I’ve been to farms inside the city limits. MetroTransit, our local bus company, has a fleet of 80 buses. For a city this size, it should have four times that number. Getting anywhere on the bus here takes more than an hour. That’s if the bus isn’t late, which they frequently are, or it didn’t break down from being old and over used. Fairly little of the city even has sidewalks. To say you need a car to get around OKC is an understatement.
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a
Sounds like Houston, Tx!
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chersolly
Sounds like Cincinnati, OH.
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Liz
As a resident of OKC as well, I concur with Jonathan. I actually attempted to ride my bike 1/2 a mile to one of my jobs for a time, but even that short distance was very dangerous and I eventually quit. I live in the NW part of the city, and there are no sidewalks here – not even in a lot of the residential areas. I drive 15 minutes to get to a large city park in order to run, when I walk my dog, I chance the both of us getting hit.
There is no good place to live in this city that will allow you to access things conveniently. There’s no real “shopping district” or “restaurant district” (save Bricktown, but that’s more formal events than something average people would casually go to), or “business district” or even pockets of supermarkets. You drive everywhere, all the time, and traffic is a mess.
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Jodie
I live in OKC, too, and I have to agree with Jonathan. I am not at all surprised that our city is the worst.
I live FIVE MILES from where I work (a university medical center, and one of the city’s largest employers). It takes one and a half to two hours to get there on the bus — it’s no wonder people here don’t use public transit. I’d ride my bike but I’d be taking my life in my hands as there are no bike lanes (and people in cars are fond of screaming “Get a car!” at bicyclists on the roads).
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melete
Well, now I’m thrilled that I don’t know how to drive yet will need to visit OKC for extensive research. D’oh.
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Roy Rhodes
An acquaintance of mine has or had a blog about living in Oklahoma City without a car. I’ve encouraged him to comment with a link, and I hope he does. I lived in OKC for five years, and not only is it spread out, but even going short distances can be a hassle. Bikes are a rare sight, so drivers aren’t used to seeing them and therefore are not gracious towards them. Sidewalks are rare outside residential zones.
Interestingly, every major city in Texas falls in that top-left corner, with only Austin outside (but barely) the magnified portion.
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a
Another great example of the total wastefulness of american utterly trashy commercialised way of life. It is clear that the people are expected to have their own private car by default in this urban environment as a mean for transportation. How vain is that? And totally unfair for the people who do not have a car.
Or perhaps it is not just the corrupt elitist architecture of these yank areas, perhaps it is due to the fact that USA simply does not really have such old level of urbanisation that the layout for city structure would have been developed naturally around non-industrialised methods of transportation, so in modern age it would have be a necessity to engineer more public transportation based on how the city had developed to be in the old days. Well, that is just my theory. I guess the real reason is still the overly induvidualist wasteful american lifestyle that simply does not pay any thought to anything else but shopping malls and drive ways in terms of city architecture. It is like the entire usonian landscape has been whored out to private commercialism and its needs to create more value.
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MSC
Though there are many things about America that needs critiquing, I would just like to point out that there is not just one American lifestyle. When you say “Yank” you seem to be referring only to middle and upper class people, who are far from being the majority. There are also many people in this country who are environmentally conscientious. Please be aware that the “America” shown on TV and in movies, is not an accurate representation of what America really is. Though there are people who fit your description (and unfortunately they seem to be the ones in charge) your generalities prevent you from accurately seeing the real problems. While some people might drive cars because of some individualistic ideal, most people just don’t have access to public transportation, or if they do, it is poorly planned like the people commenting on here from OKC. I realize you aren’t a lowly “yank” but would you spend and hour on a bus to get somewhere you could drive to in fifteen minutes? Would you risk getting stranded somewhere because the buses are so unreliable (which occurs in the city I live in)? Before you decide to make such a negative generalization about the people of an entire country, please consider that the reality might go beyond a few stereotypes.
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Duran2
OK, America-bashing aside, I think everyone can agree that the utility of public transportation goes up as population density increases (and the cost goes down.) That’s why cities, when trying to decide where the new bus routes go, use population density unserved by transit as the single biggest factor.
So, what I would like to see, is a chart showing cities’ population density plotted against usage of public transportation. I think that on such a chart, NYC would no longer be an outlier, but one extreme of a general trend.
For instance, from Wikipedia (link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density), I see that the next major cities in the USA by population density are San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. Look at where those lie on the graph. Sure looks like a general trend is emerging.
I encourage people, rather than politicizing charts like this, to come up with new and creative ways to interpreted the data.
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a belgium
Something is skewed with this data.
I’ve lived in both Seattle and Portland, and Portland by far has more walkers, bicyclist, busers, trolley and light rail riders. Seattle just got light rail this year- Portland has had it for many. Seattle has NOWHERE near as many bicyclists as Portland does.
This data is off.
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John
i doubt that the data includes walkers and bikers, since these two modes of transportation aren’t included as “public transportation”. if bike-sharing and bike-renting schemes become popular, though, i wonder if they would start to be added into public transportation figures.
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Justa
Just another Portland resident chiming in–we’ve got an absolute ton of full-time bike commuters (myself included).
And the bus system ain’t the greatest–I might give it more thought if every line here didn’t stop running by about 1:30am.
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PDXbikers
3.5% bike commuting rate in Portland ain’t anywhere near a ton. http://bikecommutetips.blogspot.com/2007/06/us-census-10-best-worst-cities-for-bike.html
Portlanders still drive a whole heck of a lot…a lot more than even Seattle-lites.
Necessity is the mother of all commuting. Living in Seattle and now Portland…the traffic in Seattle sucks so it forces one to find alternatives to commuting. In PDX, you can still get “everywhere” in 12 minutes…which allows people (that I know) to drive 1.5 miles from SE PDX to their downtown job.
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thewhatifgirl
Whoa, a not-so-great bus system that stops running at 1:30 in the morning is bad? That sounds great to me! The buses here (Tulsa, OK – a little different than OKC in that we do have a lot of sidewalks and some walkable (pre-WWII) parts of town) stop running at 7 pm, only come every hour during the week and every hour-and-a-half on Saturdays, and don’t run at all on Sundays. We don’t have a light-rail system, either. You should really be more thankful for what you have.
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b
This is something that’s been touched on in some of these comments, but I think that this graph is less illuminating than it could be because it doesn’t contain any data about why people are driving. There’s a difference between a city with little public transit infrastructure (a sparse and ailing bus system in OKC, for example) and a city with more robust transit options where people simply opt not to use them (which I perceive as the problem in LA). Both may give the same result, seen on this type of graph, but they’re totally different problems with different solutions.
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Jen
…. bikes?
Anyway, I live in downtown Milwaukee and I have to say my car is a liability more than anything. I pay each month to park it, pay at meters, try to navigate streets that are always either under construction or snow. So I take the bus and use my car a couple of times a week to visit my SO who lives in a different part of town (15 minute drive).
But this is my individual experience. I imagine that life in the suburbs is very different, I wouldn’t know as I never really go there. I could see that people who live in the ‘burbs would have to take their cars to work. But where they park them is a mystery to me.
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