Posts about Rankings

The purpose of infrastructure is to connect people, goods, information, and services. When people live close together, less infrastructure is needed to make these connections. Consider one type of infrastructure, perhaps the most representative from an urban planning perspective: roads.

Roads cost money to build and maintain. Movement along those roads creates pollution and costs the users time. All else equal, it is more efficient to build, use, and maintain fewer roads per person.

Which of the 12 statistical areas in the United States with more than 5 million inhabitants has the greatest number of people per mile of arterial roads? That honor goes to the Miami Metropolitan Area, perhaps not by choice but rather by geographic necessity, tightly bound by ocean to the east and the Everglades to the west.

In contrast, the Atlanta Combined Statistical Area (CSA), the most sprawling of the 12 regions, has roughly the same population as Miami, but its roads total a distance nearly 3 times as long. Wouldn't it be great if we could spend all the money that goes to maintaining those unnecessary miles of road on something more productive?

The DC-Baltimore-Northern Virginia CSA ranks right in the middle, at number six, just behind Los Angeles, a fact that local environmentalists probably won't find especially comforting. At least we have both Houston and Dallas beat.

Miami is the only one of the largest metro areas not to have multiple Metropolitan Statistical Areas making up one larger CSA. Does that account for the change? No; even if you look at the individual Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas that make up those 11 CSAs, Miami's still has the most people per road mile.

The gap between the Miami metro area and the second place, New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA, is closer, and without Ventura County and the Inland Empire, the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA metro area jumps to #3, but otherwise little changes in the calculation.

Cross-posted at R.U. Seriousing Me?

However, this prize doesn't belong to Bethesda alone. When Forbes says "Bethesda," they're referring to the "Bethesda-Gaithersburg-Frederick Metropolitan Division," a term used by the Census Bureau to break down the larger Washington metropolitan area. It contains Montgomery and Frederick counties. The rest of the region, including D.C., Northern Virginia, and Prince George's, Charles and Calvert counties in Maryland, belongs to the "Washington-Arlington-Alexandria Metropolitan Division."

Left: Denver is a less cool place than Montgomery County, according to Forbes.
Right: Portland didn't make the list at all. Photos by the author.

Forbes has lavished Bethesda-Gaithersburg-Frederick with many plaudits in recent years, including 2nd Smartest City, 9th Geekiest City, 5th Most Secure Place to Live, 21st Best-Performing City, and even 2nd Most Livable City. Montgomery alone has gotten its fair share of awards too, being named Utne Reader's "Most Enlightened Suburb" and making the Atlantic Cities' list of Creative Class Counties.

Still, very few people would conceive of Montgomery or Frederick counties, which together cover an area over 60 miles long, as a single "place," let alone a city. After all, some people in Kensington won't even go to Wheaton, a mile away. As a result, the Columbia Journalism Review has called Forbes' use of Metropolitan Divisions manipulative and wildly misleading.

But is that the magazine's fault, or the Census Bureau, who drew these lines in the first place? As Jarrett Walker points out, the boundaries of both metropolitan areas and cities are often arbitrary and have no relation to actual communities or social or economic connections.

The Census may lump Montgomery and Frederick counties together, but as a resident of Silver Spring, I spend more money in and have more social ties to DC than I do to Frederick. However, not only is it in another Metropolitan Division, it's in another state, sort of.

Whether or not Bethesda-Gaithersburg-Frederick deserves to be called one of America's coolest cities, the facts supporting that title still hold. With 1.2 million residents, it's comparable to the metropolitan area Salt Lake City. It has one-fifth of Maryland's jobs and 600,000 jobs and just 5 percent unemployment, compared to 8 percent nationwide.

Montgomery County has a majority-minority population with 164 countries represented in its public schools. It's got everything from the headquarters of a major media corporation to punk houses and a town lovingly called the "People's Republic." The county is even planning to build one of the country's largest rapid transit systems.

This skate shop is one of many cool things in Frederick.

And Frederick County, whose reputation as a backwater once earned it the name "Fredneck," has a bustling downtown of its own with trendy restaurants and a growing number of wineries.

We may not be the coolest, and we may not be a city in the proper definition, but there's still plenty to be proud of. And unlike Portland, the sun actually comes out in Montgomery County.

Here is the full spreadsheet of data (XLS). We mainly lose points on average park size, where our median of 0.7 acres is the smallest among the cities due to the many small federal circles, squares and triangles. 96% of residents live within ½ mile of at least one park, putting DC near the top on that metric, but for many that park is just a small federal square or triangle without many amenities.

DC also ranks low in playgrounds, with only 1.68 per 10,000 residents, which comes out to about 100 playgrounds. Downtown residents have been asking for a playground, and other neighborhoods could benefit from them as well.

ParkScore's map of DC. Parks are in green, universities in purple.
Click for interactive version.

Meanwhile, we score near the top on the other metrics. 19.1% of DC's land area is parkland, second only to San Diego and New York. This ranking unfortunately includes things like parkways and, in DC, the parking lots around RFK stadium. But that still doesn't diminish our robust amount of actual parkland, most in the large federal spaces like the Mall, Rock Creek, the Arboretum, the Anacostia and Potomac waterfronts, the Fort Circle, and more.

DC spends and the federal government spend $303.45 per capita on parks, the most of any city thanks to the Mall's role as a major national tourist destination.

In the press release, Peter Harnik, director of The Trust for Public Land's Center for City Park Excellence, notes that residents in Wards 1 and 5 especially need better park access, and there are not enough sports playing fields.

The score combines 4 factors: Bike lanes, hills, the distance to various amenities, and the percentage of people who bike commute. In DC, that concentrates the score heavily in the center. Already there is more in the center, and it's a lot flatter, which is the reason the city centers where it does.

It's important to recognize that this is just descriptive, not proscriptive prescriptive. In other words, places where few people bike get demoted in the rankings, which helps people understand and visualize where people don't bike today. But that doesn't mean that the places shaded closer to red couldn't become great places to bike, though there's nothing to do about the hills.

DC comes in behind Minneapolis, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, and Madison, but ahead of Seattle, Tucson, New York and Chicago. Do you think this is accurate?

"With gas prices expected to hit new highs, more people are riding transit, walking and biking to save money. And being able to leave your car at home more often is great for your wallet, your waistline and the environment," he said.

The company generates Transit Scores using data provided by transit agencies, and takes into account the number of nearby transit routes (weighted differently by mode), how often those routes run, and how far away the stations are from any given point. A city's score is based on a population-weighted average of all individual point scores. For an excellent discussion of the Transit Score methodology, check out this exchange between transit expert Jarrett Walker and Walk Score's Matt Lerner from early 2011.

Overall, it's fair to say that few American cities score well on the system. Of the 25 largest cities that make their transit data available to the public, only ten topped a Transit Score of 50, which is the lowest score qualifying as "good transit," described as "many transit options nearby." Most (14) fall into the "some transit" bracket, and the 25th-highest Transit Score among the cities evaluated—Raleigh, NC—is a 23, the upper end of "minimal transit."

The scale is non-linear; that is, raising a city's Transit Score from 70 to 80 would take much more work than raising it from 60 to 70. Because of the population weighting, the more people who live in a city, the harder it is to raise the score: As the Walk Score website explains, one additional bus route means a lot more for a small town than it would for a big city.

Furthermore, rail transit (including subways and light rail) is weighted at twice the value of a bus route, with ferries, cable cars, and other modes splitting the difference between the two. These numbers weren't pulled out of thin air—they reflect research that shows a range of effects of different transit modes on the value of surrounding land.

Because of this, Transit Scores will tend to be higher in the center of cities where multiple rail lines converge, but where residential population may not be at its densest. It's not hard to see how development near rail stations could make or break a city's Transit Score.

No doubt, Transit Score is a useful way to compare different neighborhoods within a city, and now entire cities as a whole. But it primarily reflects how easy it is to get to transit, rather than where you can go and what you can do with transit once you're on it.

Cross-posted at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

I analyzed the 11 heavy rail systems in the United States. Some of these cities also have light rail, commuter rail, or other transit systems, but I didn't count those. That means in Boston, I looked at stations on the Red, Blue, and Orange lines, but not Green. (Why?)

I also combined heavy rail stations from multiple operators in the same region. For example, the Philadelphia score counts both SEPTA and PATCO heavy rail stations. New York's includes PATH and the Staten Island Railway (SIRT).

And the winner is... Los Angeles?

I was surprised by the results. Los Angeles scored the highest! I certainly did not expect that. Though in hindsight, it makes a good deal of sense.

Los Angeles has only 2 heavy rail lines, the Red and Purple lines. Those lines are confined to a relatively small area in the LA Basin, with the exception of 2 stations on the Red Line in the San Fernando Valley. And while Southern California has a reputation for being sprawling, the LA Basin is actually fairly dense, especially where the Metro has been built. As a result, its score isn't dragged down by suburban park and ride stations.

In the same respect, I was surprised that BART scored better than WMATA. Large portions of the DC system serve areas that are urban or urbanizing. In contrast, BART's system is much more suburban-oriented and has very little in the way of urban circulation.

Also surprising is that New York is not an outlier. It does come in a close second to Los Angeles, but I really expected it to be off the charts compared to everyone else. The New York City Subway alone scores 90.47 without PATH and SIRT, still just below LA; SIRT averages 71.45 while PATH is higher, 92.23, but its relatively small size (13 stations) means it doesn't change the New York average even a tenth of a point.

What is not very surprising is that the sunbelt cities (except LA) score more poorly than the more urban older cities (except for Cleveland). Cleveland is at a disadvantage because of the structure of its transit system. The system only has one stop in the central business district, and that station's score isn't that impressive anyway, which harms the average.

Distribution matters

The chart above shows how Walk Scores for stations in each system are distributed. The green bars give the average score. The rectangle shows the 25th and 75th percentiles, and the lines with dots at each end show the highest and lowest Walk Scores for any station in that system.

At the high end, several cities had at least one station (sometimes several) with perfect 100-point scores. The lowest score for any station nationwide was 28 points. Two stations in the Washington region—Arlington Cemetery and Morgan Boulevard—and one station in San Francisco—North Concord/Martinez—had that score.

The distribution is important in understanding how well distributed the well-scoring stations are in the system.

In Washington, the distribution is weighted more toward good-scoring stations, but there are still a lot of poor-scoring stations, too.

Compare that to San Francisco's BART, where there are fewer poor-scoring stations. Instead, there are a large quantity of stations in the middle of the distribution.

New York and Cleveland offer contrast to each other. While most New York stations score very well, Cleveland's don't rank above medium.

Limitations

The Walk Score algorithm is not perfect. It works by calculating the quantities and distances of various amenties. There are other factors which it does not measure that help to define the walkability of an area.

For example, a street grid makes an area much more walkable than a sprawling network of superblocks and culs-de-sac. The quality and proliferation of sidewalks also influences walkability. But these factors aren't currently part of Walk Score; there's no good data file for Walk Score to use that shows where there are and aren't good sidewalks, for example.

Regardless, Walk Score gives us a standard and fairly good measure to compare transit stations (and systems) to each other.

The site also features custom commute reports, allowing users to compare their commutes by foot, bike, transit and automobile. Using data from real estate website Zillow and the Center for Neighborhood Technology's Housing+Affordability Index, these commute profiles allow users to see how much of their monthly budget they can expect to spend on combined housing and transportation costs. The real estate search site ZipRealty has integrated these scores into all of their listings.

By providing these tools to a mass market looking for real estate, knowledge about the relationship between location and transportation can become more easily accessible. You don't have to be an urbanist - or the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - to make the connection between transportation and the bottom line.