Smaller Cities With Great Transit: 10 Metro Areas Under a Million Population With High Ridership

I once saw someone say people love college so much because they get to experience walkability and solid public transportation for the first time in their lives

Student run bus companies are surprisingly common. UC Davis has one as well. They started with old double decker London busses. Students drive and do almost everything else. There’s just a handful of professional staff

Awesome video, as a student living in a college town I’m not surprised that the list was almost entirely made up of them. Before you said the towns were over 50k I thought ski towns were going to be on the list. The systems of Aspen, Vail, and Breckenridge are kind of crazy for how well they work. I think that would be an interesting video topic.

I drove a bus for 7 of my 8 semesters at UMass! we operate as a garage of the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority (PVTA). the garage is almost entirely student-run, from the training department, to the bus drivers, dispatchers, and much of IT too. there were maybe 8-10 salaried adult staff across the entire operation of 200 or so students. our GM started out as a bus driver himself when he was in school. several of the mechanics are also former student drivers themselves! it really was a fascinating ecosystem as a whole and my favorite job I've ever had

Blacksburg on a CityNerd list? It's a dream come true! Headways of 15min at peak hour kinda suck, but the bus system in Blacksburg is wildly popular in no small part because Virginia Tech won't expand parking and instead is investing in transit amenities. It's great!

I live in Ames and had no idea we would rank so high! I appreciated the note about our downtown. It has really improved a lot since I moved here in 2012. An area that used to be relatively dead (in my memory) is now busy at almost any time of any day.

I've said a lot in the nearly twenty years since I left college, it's kind of cruel that we send kids off to nice walkable mid sized cities with good transit for their first taste of adult life, and then when they graduate they have to either spend millions to get a home in a high demand walkable neighborhood or spend their whole career commuting by car, with few exceptions.

Here in Germany, there's a town called Gotha that has its own tram system with 5 lines, 32 total stops and a rolling stock of 20 vehicles. Population: 45,000. It's a bit of an anomaly, though in many east German towns, a tram network still exists while they were mostly dismantled during the car age in the 60s and onwards. The Gotha one is also very old, it was introduced in 1897 and has never stopped operation. Forgot to mention: it is also connected to the "Thuringian forest train", which is a tram that goes to some other villages and has a total length of about 22km. Pretty fun for such a small and not densely populated place.

I live in Blacksburg and while the bus system is amazing for students, it’s not very convenient for locals since every route goes into the center of campus, and none reach the outlying areas of the city where most locals live

Oh man. I went to Honolulu for New Years and was blown away by the greatness of their bus network. I’ve lived in transit-rich cities most of my life, and it basically held serve.

I live in Chicago, home of easily one of the greatest public transit systems in the country. I often feel that the two main factors that are holding us back from being even better than we are are: 1) The suburbs and their far lower proportion of transit and commuter rail ridership which greatly impacts us on lists like this because of metropolitan area, which ties into.. 2) Car culture's dominance in the Midwest, where (obviously) a lot of people who come to our metro area are from. Even in the city itself where our public transit system is AWESOME, it would be so much more awesome if all these folks utilized it instead of their cars. Frequency in busses could/would improve, we'd get even more bike lanes (though we are improving, but not as fast as we should), and heck, we may even get an 'outer loop' L line!! #GiveMeTheSilverLine

I went to grad school at the University of Illinois and CUMTD was incredibly convienent plus free for students (undergrad or grad). The city of Champaign even talked about getting light rail in the early 2000s but nixed it as being too costly for city their size. So I'm not at all surprised to see them at #2 on this list.

6:44 was a real eye opener to my views on stroad regeneration. It shows to me how it is possible to transform roads to be a size that's more appropriate and not act as high speed corridors in cities. Im glad you included this. Would it be possible to make a video as a guide to cities for retrofitting these roads?

Students can absolutely be bus drivers as a work study job. It's apparently the most coveted work-study job at UMASS Amherst. (my friend is in grad school there)

Great video! Small towns can be great not necessarily for public transport but for not needing a car. The small town I live in in Scotland has everything you would need (or most things anyway) within about a 15 minute walk, so you don’t really need transit in the same way

I’m sure the Aspen “urban area” didn’t meet population criteria but its transit system is extremely impressive

The HART system is a lot further long along than Google is showing. The guideway is complete from its western terminus to west of HNL airport. There is barely a mile left to get to Middle Street Transit Center -- the approximate halfway point -- which is where all the city bus lines converge. Also, the trains are on the property, the yard is complete. Once the trains start running, the pressure to complete it through downtown will be enormous.

I went to grad school at Cornell and was astounded at how much coverage the public bus system had. I was there for two years and took the bus almost every day to class or biked. Highly recommend it for anyone that wants to live in a gorgeous area with way more going on than your typical "Small Town USA".

I grew up in HNL and rode TheBus for years, particularly in high school. Being able to reliably get around the island without depending on my parents was HUGE. There isn't a huge stigma either because so many people there have taken the bus at some point or another. I think part of the reason TheBus is so successful is because the central core (what locals call "town") is pretty urbanized, pretty walkable, etc. Also, routes go all over the island, from the suburbs to the countryside, and most people are within a mile of a bus stop that gets bus service at least twice an hour. There are also a lot of immigrants who don't have licenses and can't drive, so they depend on busses to get everywhere. Two major weaknesses off the top of my head - bus service to the airport isn't the most convenient, and the busses mostly operate in mixed traffic, which gets very congested during rush hour.

Well, this was a fun video to watch while taking CyRide to class. I kept rooting for Ames to show up, my only concern was that we weren't quite big enough to make the list. CyRide really is a great resource, especially for students (who ride free). By the way, it was fun to see how some major cities ranked against the smaller ones on the list. It helps emphasize that there isn't a "one size fits all" approach to transit - biking, walking, and buses can be all it takes to make a place like Ames well connected.