MBTA Loses in Public Transit Comparison: Short, Slow, and Subpar

This graphic would do a better job of pointing out the MBTA's flaws if the metrics it used were actually meaningful. Daily Ridership, Average Distance, and Average Speed are all more or less meaningless statistics, because you can't compare them cross-regionally. Ridership and Distance depend more on each city's population and size than any measure of how well-run the transit system is or how well it's serving it's customers. Of course NYC has the highest daily ridership, it's the biggest city! Speed depends at least as much on how many stops there are... if our entire transit system consisted of an express line between Government Center and Kenmore, it could run 50mph underground, but it wouldn't be very useful.

I'd much rather see comparisons of per-capita ridership, % of city within 1/4 mile of a transit stop, % of trains that are on-time, and average wait time between trains.

The MBTA has plenty of problems, but you should at least slam it for real problems, not having lower ridership than a city with 10 times its population.

I think the whole point is that the suckiness of the Green line, and other aspects of the MBTA, are what make the MBTA not as good as other transit systems.

While it's always fun to beat on the MBTA because it's an easy target, one user on Twitter reminded me that the Green Line is severely burdened and considerably slower than any of the other lines for three reasons and for these reasons is likely the largest dead weight for Boston's stats here:

That said, New York, Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco benefit from having mostly grade-separated transit and some cities even have ONLY heavy rail transit. Additionally, New York has dedicated express tracks with significantly faster service that can greatly skew the numbers in its favour (even during rush hour). A better breakdown of the stats by class of transit would be more meaningful...

i agree that the green line is probably a suck on the MBTA stats, but that's more reason to improve green line service than dismiss poor stats, right? running more express service and eliminating stops might be a start. it's definitely a sticky issue, but there must be some solution that doesn't involve a "transportation" system that's often slower than walking.