I was using NYC as a model. I wanted to get commuters exclusively. In NYC, the vast majority of people who travel from the suburb are commuters, meaning they take the train every day to and from work. The subway system is no doubt used by commuters, but also by people going shopping, going to dinner, etc. Like I said, it was very crude.
Nobody drives in the city anymore, it’s just too crowded!
It’s a tricky one. On the London Underground Wikipedia page, the figures given are 3.4 million passengers on weekdays, and 3 million on weekends. But there is no way on god’s green earth that there are only 400,000 Underground commuters in London. A quick look at the platform of pretty much any station in any city with an extensive underground system at rush hour makes that common sense.
Also, several of the Underground lines in London and many other cities are extremely long, and are under/overground hybrids (e.g. the Metropolitan Line which goes all the way out to Buckinghamshire). Have a look at the London rail system. It’s mindboggling and the Underground is a vast part of it. I would argue that excluding the idea of commuters using excusively underground systems risks eliminating a vast number of train-borne commuters and makes your ‘crude’ estimate almost totally useless - though I acknowledge it’s terribly difficult to work out a true figure.
I’ll say. After all, it doesn’t even apply to New York, where regional rail riders are underground for the last few miles of their journeys into Penn or GCT and subway riders are above ground in the outer boroughs. That’s why we usually look to such elements as equipment type, fare structure, and station spacing when distinguishing metro/rapid transit from *suburban/regional rail.
*
While I agree completely with your larger point and criticism of the crudeness of the parameters I’ve been using, the underground portion of the MetroNorth and LIRR lines is largely just an accident of getting to the underground terminal. Completely so for MetroNorth and I think for the LIRR, though I could be wrong about that. But like I said, it’s a crude distinction to apply. Do you have a better one? How might you have phrased the query?
By the way, who do you mean by “we”? Do you work in the industry?
Isn’t it much simpler, that all travel between 7am-9:30am and 4:30-8pm is commuter while the rest is “everything else”. If I’m not traveling to work I go out of my way to avoid going anywhere in rush hour, as do most people in my experience, so it’s pretty safe to assume commuter traffic above 90 percent during those hours.
The true figure would be transport by subway, light rail, regional rail, and high speed rail* etc etc during those hours.
- a huge number of people in Japan commute from up to 200 km from Tokyo on the Shinkansen (Bullet Train)
Using time would be WAY more accurate, but I didn’t (don’t) that information would be available that way. Except by the actual rail lines.
Did you use only the DC population of about 620,000 or the metro area estimate of 5.58 million? The MARC Train, which I take, has about 33,000 riders according to Wiki, they come from as far away as Martinsburg, WV and close to Philadelphia, PA which are outside of the Metro area. I honestly can’t see DC having more riders then NYC.
Sure, but the rail lines have no reason to hide this info, with automated ticket systems they know their rider numbers broken down by time of day perfectly well and they probably make it publicly available on their websites so there’s no reason to use such a crude measure.
Does this account for the multiple commuter rails options in NYC (which, in addition to the MTA subways, also has the LIRR, the Metro-North, the PATH trains and probably others) and Chicago (which has the Metra and the South Shore Line in addition to the CTA)?
That’s why I keep trying to lead you to the well-accepted terms metro or rapid transit vs. regional rail.
My background is in city planning, particularly transport, and I continue to follow the field closely. Some of my mapping clients are transit agencies and DOTs. But mostly I mean “we” transit and rail enthusiasts.
I wouldn’t say that “very few people” commute by rail in San Francisco, even if we’re excluding subways/metros and light rail (over 150,000 daily users of San Francisco Muni’s Metro) and just counting commuter rail, and even if we’re counting BART (367k weekdays/309k weekends) as a subway/metro.
Some quick googling found that over 40,000 people ride CalTrain every weekday, which is pretty good for a single commuter line. For comparison, Caltrain would be busier than any single Metra (Chicago commuter rail) line except for the BNSF and possibly the UP-Northwest. As for the commute-vs-pleasure part of the question, Caltrain’s 40k weekday ridership contrasts to about 13k on Saturdays and 9k on Sundays.
The answer to the question has got to be Tokyo. There are many train lines, and each one carries a huge number of passengers. I’ve been there, and also to several of the other places mentioned in this thread: New York, Washington, London, etc. The difference is like night and day.
CalTrain would be probably pretty invisible for a City (and County) of San Francisco resident, unless they are reverse commuting down the Peninsula for their work. But as John Bredin said just above, it probably keeps enough Peninsula commuters off the freeways and major feeders to and from those freeways to keep the general freeway gridlock from being completely unbearable.
The link was helpful. Thanks. I’m not sure that the terminology is as clear/specific in the lay person’s mind as it is in yours, or that the distinction is always clear in the real world, but I think what you suggest is better than how I’ve been going about it. I certainly have nothing to lose by adopting your terminology, and it would probably help. So, thank you.
Shanghai is fifth and Guangzhou is sixth.
Mumbai isn’t on the list, probably because their metro is not set to open until December 2012.
Unless you were talking about something else?
Probably this…
Suburban rail systems don’t generally have turnstiles. They have no way to know what time of day a monthly pass or multiride ticket is used.