Brookings Loonies « Systemic Failure

Drunk Engineer writes: Brookings Loonies « Systemic Failure: "Oh my, what is the Brookings ‘Institution’ smoking? Their report on transit performance ranks Silicon Valley as #3 in the nation for what they term ‘transit access’ — even better than New York City. They also rank the Valley’s sprawling office parks as #3 in the nation for transit-accessible employment. Silicon Valley, I must point out, has a whopping 3.5% transit mode-share."

To defend Brookings for a minute, they are not measuring performance, they are measuring access and coverage. Access to jobs within 90 minutes (as a %) is much better for small cities than large, because you must reach the end of the region within that time (there are limits to transit inefficiency). Coverage is typically better in gridlike (western and midwestern) cities, since most people can reach transit by walking. Those two things are factors in mode share, but do not alone define mode share, which depends on many other things. It is these measurements which are useful. One can easily question their thresholds for walk distance or % of jobs within 90 minutes (compared to say, total jobs with 45 minutes), that is not (or should not be) the point. The point is the data is now all together in one place where it can be systematically compared. I agree Fresno is not one of the top 10 US cities for transit.