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Paul Mees in Transport for Suburbia ( http://books.google.com/books?id=D3K0FMVhcjsC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false ) tries to demonstrate that there is no meaningful correlation between density and transit ridership.

I can't speak for the southeast as I have never been there, but in the Midwest the new suburbs are surprisingly walkable. Sure, it ain't Midtown Manhattan, but sidewalks exist where needed, and bike lanes are becoming increasingly common. You could safely walk to the corner store or to the grocery store, and not leave a sidewalk or low-traffic street. Low ridership in the suburbs generally means that transit there sucks, not that the density is too low.

One trend of note is that I have noticed that cities west of the Mississippi tend to put more effort into basic sidewalk and bike lane infrastructure, while cities east of the Mississippi tend to be more cars-only. If walkability were an A-F metric, areas west of the Mississippi would be about a consistent "C" while areas east of the Mississippi would fluctuate between "A" for the old city centers to "F" for anything built after 1980.

Ames, Iowa, the magical transit friendly place where Democrats are always elected, cars are banned, and everyone lives in a tenement has a transit-boardings-per-capita on par with the Washington Metro Area. So much for the myth that you have to be old, large, or dense to have decent transit service. Compare the schedules for Ames ( http://www.cyride.com ) to the schedules in most other American communities of the same size and demographics. For one, Ames has fairly decent Sunday bus service despite only having 60,000 people.

by Zmapper on Jul 12, 2012 8:31 pm • link • report