People really love to hate on Los Angeles's public transportation system, but those people are going to have to pipe down now that a study from the University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies has named LA the nation's third best city for commuting by public transit, behind only super-obvious frontrunners New York and San Francisco. We are the bronze medalists of getting to work via transit! According to Wired, the study looked at 46 of the 50 most populous metros in the US and crunched the numbers on job "accessibility," or how easily jobs could be reached.
The researchers assigned a value to jobs accessible within certain time frames (with job locations from the Census Bureau), giving those that can be reached in 10 minutes worth more than those that can be reached in 20, for example. They also factored in "detailed pedestrian networks" and transit schedules for business days between 7 and 9 am, to accommodate transit frequency and wait times. The greater the number of jobs accessible in the shortest periods of time, the better a city's score. (The researchers who performed the study do admit this method favors cities with larger populations because it counts the total number of accessible jobs.)
This study was conducted by the same center that produced a 2013 study showing that LA is the number one city in the US for car commuting. They've provided a zoomable map of LA jobs accessible within 30 minutes here and suggest to Wired that "encouraging both residents and employers to locate in parts of the city already served by transit" can improve accessibility for everyone.
· Access Across America: Transit 2014 [Official site]
· America's 10 Best Cities for Commuting on Public Transit [Wired]
· Real Study Found That LA is Best in the US For Car Commuting [Curbed LA]
· Mapping the Average Commute Time From Every Part of LA [Curbed LA]
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