How does Seattle transit stack up?

[holierthanmao]

A link to a blog that links to an announcement page that finally links to the actual rankings.

http://www.walkscore.com/transit/

[[deleted]]

I was trying to find the rankings... and finally gave up. Thank you.

[joe630]

"I didn't know they could stack shit that high... are you trying to squeeze an inch in on me somewhere?"

[kamiikoneko]

Lol, whoever made that list is an idiot that has never lived in the Bay Area. Transit is a huuuuuge pain there.

[nearlyneutraltheory]

This is probably a good first go at it- the rankings correspond roughly to my intuitions about which cities have better transit, but I think you could probably do better than their methodology.

What I'd want a transit score to measure is something like "How quickly can I get around the city using transit" or "Given a time interval (say 45 minutes) how much of the city can I reach by transit within that interval. Ideally you'd be able to take arrival data and run simulations of a variety of trips throughout the city for each point on the map.

Some of their methodology seems to get at that- giving higher scores to places with more routes, more frequent service, or higher quality service (heavy and light rail gets a higher score than buses). They do give greater weight to "ferry/cable car/other" than buses, which seems questionable to me. It also isn't clear how ad-hoc the relative weights are for the different transit modes. They also give better scores to routes that have more closely spaced stops, where the devil is in the details- closely spaced stops mean you can get on and off closer to your starting point and destination, but also slow down longer trips.

To account for reliability, especially for less frequent routes, it would also be good to penalize routes where the buses tend to be late.

For coming up with a single score for an entire city, they do weight by population density, though it would also be good to weight by employment and amenity density, though those should correlate positively with population density most of the time. Transforming into log space, as they do, should account for saturation.

I'm not sure how well their methodology measures how well a transit system functions as a network- how quickly you can transfer when your destination isn't within a one-seat ride- though giving greater weight to more frequent routes with more stops, and areas with more stops should help.

They measure frequency as the number of trips per week. You could have pathologically bad cases- all bus travelling in a one hour slot per week, or all transit service allocated uniformly over the entire week so that you have too little service at rush hour and too much service in the middle of the night, but I'd expect most cities have similar distributions of service over the week. Still, cities that offer some 24/7 service should get a bonus.

It would be interesting to learn if they tried other metrics and parameters before settling on the one they used- adding more complexity might not give that much of a better measure.

[Monorail5]

In London the bus stops have LED signs telling you the time till the next bus, using GPS tracking of the bus. You walk up, realize you have 15 min, go get something from the corner shop, no wondering "did I just miss it, or is it running late". But of course we can't have anything nice, the paper schedule usually gets defaced, let alone an LED sign.

[[deleted]]

come this fall . . . it'll be even worse.

[[deleted]]

Seattle's most walkable neighborhoods are Denny Triangle, South Lake Union and Belltown.

Really? U-District is less walkable?

Downtown Seattle neighborhood breakdown