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Old Posted Feb 15, 2022, 5:48 PM
Smuttynose1 Smuttynose1 is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2007
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
Not to harp on the SF ridership (OK, I'm harping), but looking at these maps of car-free households and rail lines, I'm still dumbfounded that SF has twice the ridership of Chicago.

https://www.liberallandscape.org/202...united-states/

Chicago has a vastly larger geography of car-free living. And it isn't just low-income tracts. Many multiples larger. And the same is true of Boston, DC, Philly and even Baltimore. And SF almost certainly has the worst transit quality of Chicago-SF-Boston-Philly-DC.

But that said, I have no reason to doubt the data. It just must be that car-owning Bay Area households use transit much moreso than in other transit-oriented metros.
I think Chicago, Boston, Philly, and NYC to some extent wrestle with these vast legacy systems that have not been adequately maintained. They haven't kept up with demand because they've got their hands full trying to address a backlog of maintenance and other issues. The quote below pretty well sums up the state of Alewife Station, one of the largest in the MBTA system in Boston --

Lawmakers Vent Over State Of Crumbling Alewife Garage
https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/08/14...alewife-garage

"Have you looked at the Alewife station? It's being held up by hydraulic jacks. It has been for years," Friedman said at a meeting of the T's Fiscal and Management Control Board. "It floods. It's disgustingly dirty, you can't find somebody there to help you, a T employee — we assume they've all been reassigned — and it is in such a state of disrepair that people are frankly scared to go there, and yet it is the only place to park if you take the Red Line from those west and northwestern suburbs, so we are really in a crunch here."
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