Massive Transit Fail

I've noted how inadequate our local bus service in the Santa Rosa area seems, given how large a community this is. My only metrics for this were the limited hours of service, low frequency of service on each route, and my casual perception of low ridership.

My friend Mike just shared with me an online resource that gives us a quantitative look at just how poorly we fare in urban transit compared with the rest of the country. Check out:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-your-citys-public-transit-stacks-up/

This link features a searchable list of 290 of the country's major urban areas. The greater Santa Rosa area, with over 314,000 people, is well above the threshold for inclusion in this list.The table is ranked by how many transit rides per capita took place in each metropolis in 2013. Not surprisingly, New York City comes in first by a mile with 229.8 trips per capita. SF-Oakland is a distant second with 131.5 rides.

Santa Rosa? 125th with just 12.3 rides per person. OK, let's not make a big deal about us being less transit-friendly than the nation's biggest urban areas. Let's make some fairer comparisons. Santa Cruz, half the size of greater Santa Rosa with 169,000 people, nearly triples our per-capita ridership at 33.1. Fresno (670,000), which just about no one in Sonoma County would look to as a greener or more enlightened community, beats us with 17.3 rides. Chico, Santa Barbara, Stockton, Oxnard, and quite a few other California cities larger and smaller than us, also beat our ridership. (OK, some California cities do worse than us, but pretty few.)

So what's going on here? I doubt Santa Rosans are all that ideologically opposed to public transit. Public transit gets its share of lip service, but not many butts on the seats. Maybe it's an affluent enough community that more people have the choice to drive here than in other places. Whatever other factors are at work, I really do think a serious investment in better service -- more frequent trips, more routes, and longer operating hours -- would get results and make us look better in those rankings next time around. It will be interesting to see how County transit's new policy of free service for veterans and college students affects ridership for 2015.