The 10 Worst Transit Cities: US Metro Areas Where Taking the Bus or Rail May Just Crush Your Soul

As someone from KC, the streetcar really has made a huge difference, and is a lot more than just a tourist attraction. It's had double the estimated riders and increased city-wide transit ridership by 30%. If you did a list of top ridership increases in the past few years (with very recent data) KC would probably be pretty high due to the streetcar and it and the buses being free now

I was totally expecting Texas cities to dominate the list. Anytime any suggestion of a public transit investment comes up, all the oversized pickup truck driving rancher cosplay folks show up to scream "socialism!" and it goes nowhere.

I live in Orange County, CA, and when I’ve tried to use public transit, I’ve usually found the routes and scheduling so maddeningly inconvenient that I give up. It’s almost like the transit authorities around here take this passive-aggressive attitude toward public transit: “Fine, you can have it, but we won’t make it useful.” People who don’t have the option of cars are screwed by a system that almost seems designed to punish people for not having a car.

The state of Indiana made a genius policy decision to ban light rail from the entire state. This was done as a political "screw you" from one group of special interests groups to another, and had nothing to do with light rail itself

"Do you even have transit in Cincinnati?" "Yeah... SORTA" Doesn't really inspire confidence 😂😂😂

The sad thing about Detroit is a quarter of the residents don’t own cars and rely on the bus. You’ll see many busses go by that say “bus full” on them and pass up a dozen or more people waiting at a stop. Then you’re stuck waiting at least 30 minutes to an hour for the next one…if it shows up…or if it has room. If the system had the capacity the ridership would not be as low.

I'm a long haul trucker. I've attempted to use public transport from truck stops and commercial/industrial dropyard or abandoned mall parking on my folding bike. My success rate is 1%. Basically Portland OR.

Im a civil engineering student in Norfolk VA, I’ve done a project regarding the light rail here and it crushes my soul. Im working on other transit related projects in the area and Hampton Roads (Norfolk, Portsmouth, VA beach, etc) is easily the most disjointed political nightmare for any civil engineer to work in. Thank you for talking about my shitty swamp town. (update) - now working as an engineer here, its just as bad as i thought.

This video is just another reminder of how much money is being devoted to the automobile. The crazy urban planning, or lack there of, which encourages people to depend primarily on autos is quite sad. Although I live in a big city (Atlanta) that didn’t make any of your lists I came from a city that had decent mass transit (Chicago). There’s just too must resistance to building in good transit into new developments. And then people complain about gas prices - geez.

Arlington TX, located between Dallas and Ft Worth, population 300k, be like: what's a bus??

As a German it is incredible what passes for good or decent service quality I live in a "metro area" of maybe generously 75,000 people and what you call nice BRT amenities is basically what 60-70% of our bus stops look like. The transit trips per inhabitants per year is around 156 for the statistics I could find.

I’m from the Hampton Roads area and served on HRT’s riders advisory board for the majority of the 2010s. My final straw was Virginia Beach voting down the extension of the light rail and the local paper called it a 57%-43% landslide, which is absurd. I’m now a resident of DC and it’s a 5 minute walk to the orange line and a 12 minute frequency bus line to work. Beats an hour frequency back home ;)

You have it right with Cincinnati: a beautiful urban fabric with sub-par (sub-sub-par?) public transit. What exists of the streetcar is great, there’s just not nearly enough of it.

I still find it amazing that Cincinnati used to have 222 miles worth of Streetcar track, one of the largest in the us, and all of that was torn down in the 1950s. Our new streetcar had some hiccups when it opened in 2016, mostly due to our Governor pulling funding for the Uptown Line in 2011(which sabotaged a lot of its ridership that would have come from connecting Uptown with the basin) but operating fare free since 2020 it is now being used as a legit transportation system between OTR and Downtown. Its last few months have seen the highest consistent ridership in its 6 year history and one of the highest ridership in the modern streetcar systems built. A study in 2008 found it would cost 100 million to bring the abandoned subway into something that is being used as a subway, prob would be more like 200 million now but the fact that we still have it and it is relatively cheap compared to building a brand new subway in the future, I hope Cincinnati finds a way to make a nice regional Light Rail and BRT network(BRT going in places that would be unfeasible to reach via light rail) with Streetcar extensions in the urban core to serve a the dense urban core (Clifton, West End, Camp Washington, Newport, Covington) as envisioned in the MetroMoves plan in 2002. Leadership of SORTA has been very very lackluster since they passed the 0.5% tax to increase routes. Our regional planning organization, OKI, had its CEO make comments last year that our region will always be car based(which is just asinine to think about). The levy has brought much more consistency now to Metro, but the other portions of bringing BRT have yet to even make it to the planning phase, which angers me. I truly believe if they would ask for a 0.25% increase in Sales Tax to bring the Metro Moves plan into full fruition combined with the prior 0.5% increase, Hamilton County would vote for it. Your comment about our urban fabric is very true, but the sad fact is that before I-75 and the horrible planning of a light industrial office park to replace a bustling impoverished but strong community into now vacant and decaying 60s industrial waste of buildings, our urban fabric was of the caliber of cities like Detroit and Philidelphia. At one point Cincinnati was the densest city in the United States outside of Manhattan and Hoboken in the mid to late 1800s. The 2-3 sq mile Downtown-OTR-West End urban basin in 1890 had a population density of 38,000 people per square mile (!!!). Look up the before and after pictures of the West End. The city displaced 26,000 mostly Black Cincinnatians for "urban renewal" and the highway. Ironically this was spinned in such a way that the ward of the West End voted for the bond measure funding it in 1956, thinking it would better the lives of everyone in the neighborhood. Even building the highway, a bit of the neighborhood west of the highway would have remained, they built Queensgate in its place in the mid to late 1960s. Worst mistake our city made, of the caliber of the subway remaining unfinished. Im glad a portion of the neighborhood remains, but it is sad to see it a shell of what it was before urban renewal tore it apart.

I always love how economists and environmentalists are arch nemesis, but urban planning issues are probably the only area they all agreed on. Urban cities that have dense, walkable, AND affordable housing are always most optimal. It is always better to have cheap houses in cities than cheap houses in suburbs, and the best thing to protect nature is to stay the hell away from it.

Americans.."THESE GAS PRICES ARE INSANE"!!!!!!!!! Americans "NO WAY AM I TAKING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION"!!!!!!

Also, my grandparents lived in the Memphis area, & you can basically explain it as an extreme case of white flight to the surburbs that's still ongoing. Every summer or Christmas we went to visit our folks growing up, the "nice" suburbs had moved further out w/ new construction, what had previously been the "nice" suburbs interior to those tended to age pretty quickly, & traveling inward from there you'd see truly dilapidated sprawl that would have been vibrant only a decade or 2 prior. That's symptomatic of the ongoing capital disinvestment from Memphis proper. Although downtown has revitalized some with the streetcar, there's still a lot of neighborhoods within a 5 minute walk of that ROW which have been deliberately & catastrophically blighted, particularly for the Medical Center line. And then redlining just adds another layer on top of that: close-in pre-WWII single-family neighborhoods like Overton Park that are affluent & moderately dense but have basically zero transit service as a deliberate policy choice. In short, whenever I hear anyone mention how US cities are still as segregated as they were under Jim Crow, I think of Memphis, & how basically everything happening in that city to this day still boils down to white ppl still refusing to integrate.

I’m shocked Columbus, Ohio wasn’t in the top 10

I will say that here in Cincinnati, we did have a ballot measure pass to increase service for METRO, there are now some 24 hr lines that run with 15 20 minute headways. Unfortunally back in the early 2000s we voted down 2 to 1 a plan for more transit (Metro Moves if you want to look it up) so thats sad

While cycling, nothing scares me more than large trucks, trailers or busses. Shared bike & bus and it's painted lane sounds like a horror movie plot for me.