Boise compared to peers
I'm curious about how poorly Boise performs relative to its peers.
Boise is the 109th
largest urban area in the United States, with about 350,000 people. Let's just look at others with a comparable population (excluding resorts or any that are arguably suburbs of larger places) and see what sort of ridership they get.
Code:
CITY RIDERS/DAY
Boise 4,650
Modesto CA 12,100*~
Flint MI 16,500
Jackson MS 2,000*~
Pensacola FL 5,100*~
Mobile AL 4,000*~
Crps Chrisi TX 20,000
So not the worst, but definitely in that lower tier.
But none of those are northwestern cities. Lets expand the population search a little to see the comparables that are closer geographically.
Code:
CITY RIDERS/DAY UA POPULATION
Reno NV 20,400 392,000
Spokane WA 35,500 388,000
Eugene OR 35,100 247,000
Salem OR 12,100 237,000
Put all this together and it's hard to make a case that Boise isn't underperforming. But let's normalize by population. That'll be interesting regardless of this Boise question.
Ridership per capita for major western cities & Boise comparables:
Lets do some per capita calculations. I'm going to switch to
metro areas for this (rather than urbanized areas), because the huge service areas for Denver, Phoenix, and SLC require using the
CSA subset of metro areas to reflect their full coverage areas. It's as close to an apples-to-apples way to do it as possible.
Code:
CITY RIDERS/DAY POPULATION RIDES PER PERSON PER DAY
Boulder 33,000 319,372 .103 (included in RTD; this is a subset)
Eugene 35,100 362,895 .097
Denver 329,000 3,418,876 .096
Spokane 35,500 547,924 .065
Tucson 61,000 1,010,025 .060
SLC 142,000 2,467,709 .058
Phoenix 203,000 3,629,114 .056
Logan 6,700 133,857 .050
Albuquerque 41,000 907,301 .045
Reno 20,400 450,890 .045
Crps Christi 20,000 452,422 .044
Flint 16,500 410,849 .040
Ft Collins 11,400 333,577 .034 (includes Loveland)
Salem 12,100 410,091 .030
Modesto 12,100 538,388 .022
Pueblo 3,300 163,591 .020
Grnd Junction 2,400 148,513 .016
Colo Spgns 10,600 697,856 .015
Pensacola 5,100 478,043 .011
Mobile 4,000 415,395 .010
Boise 4,650 676,909 .007
Jackson 2,000 578,777 .003