The best U.S. transit systems you never knew existed 15

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1. 

   Delay And Deny Posted 11:58 pm
   14 Jun 2009

    Think twice about 'green' transport, say scientists How Much Green Can Green Upgrades Save?
   
           You worry a lot about the environment and do everything you can to reduce your carbon footprint -- the emissions of greenhouse gases that drive dangerous climate change.
   
   So you always prefer to take the train or the bus rather than a plane, and avoid using a car whenever you can, faithful to the belief that this inflicts less harm to the planet.
   
   Well, there could be a nasty surprise in store for you, for taking public transport may not be as green as you automatically think, says a new US study.
   
   Its authors point out an array of factors that are often unknown to the public.
   
   These are hidden or displaced emissions that ramp up the simple "tailpipe" tally, which is based on how much carbon is spewed out by the fossil fuels used to make a trip.
   
   Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath at the University of California at Davis say that when these costs are included, a more complex and challenging picture emerges.
   
   In some circumstances, for instance, it could be more eco-friendly to drive into a city -- even in an SUV, the bete noire of green groups -- rather than take a suburban train. It depends on seat occupancy and the underlying carbon cost of the mode of transport.

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2. 

   Cacaoatl Posted 4:20 am
   15 Jun 2009

   I wish we had some of the transit options shown here where I live in the SF Bay Area.  Getting to different cities is a breeze on BART except it doesn't go to San Jose in spite of San Jose being a major city in the Bay Area. Transportation in San Francisco and San Jose is awesome but in Almameda County where I live, AC Transit is a mess. We don't have light rail, AC Transit is constantly cutting service, insanity seems like a prerequisite to drive on some routes, buses are constantly late as if schedules were a suggestion, they don't get traffic light priority or bus only lanes, and they keep jacking up the fares while offering less and less service.

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3. 

   Brudaimonia Posted 6:36 am
   15 Jun 2009

   Florida also had been trying to get a 61-mile commuter rail corridor into Orlando, but the project's future is up in the air now.Another "unsung" transit system that could be on this list:- Minneapolis/St. Paul: opened the Hiawatha LRT about 5 years ago.  Ridership and station-area development vastly exceeded projections.  Future plans are commuter rail from the west into downtown Minneapolis and the Central Corridor LRT from Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, down University Ave.  Buses are pretty well coordinated and have an extensive service area.  It also helps that the Twin Cities have a wonderful biking network and a strong biking/green culture.

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4. 

   randino Posted 7:04 am
   15 Jun 2009

   It has always been a source of amusement to the great majority of RTA riders in Cleveland that the system was declared the best in the nation.  "If this is the best, I'd hate to think of the worst!" is what you would hear.There are two intractable problems for rapid transit. First, is the funding.  Always daunting in the face of city hating and highway loving legislatures.  Second, is that you cannot avoid issues of race and class in the distribution of public transit goodies.  Everyone wants public transit to serve their communities, but few want "those people" to have easy access to their pristine, whiter than white suburbs. Address those two issues and you might make some real progress.  Warts and all I take RTA every day and there is no way and no how I want to diss it, just point out some issues you never hear in polite company.  Having a bus stop three houses down was a reason for us to buy a house where we did, and I would not have read a quarter of what I have, (including Grist articles) without taking the RTA.Randy Cunningham / Cleveland OH 

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5. 

   Stephanie Ogburn Posted 7:49 am
   15 Jun 2009

   Umm, the transit systems in SF and the Bay Area are not all stars. They
   are expensive, infrequent, difficult to navigate, uncoordinated and
   unwieldy. BART, the train, only takes you to a very limited range of
   places. It's not a public transit system - it's a commuter shuttle that
   regular people can't even afford. You can't even take bikes on BART in
   rush hour - a major minus for using bike/transit to get to work. Buses
   in SF and the Bay Area don't run very often to any place that is not a
   main commuter locale, and they require exact change (annoying and
   difficult.) There's also not a good system of having a card or discount
   if you transfer from one transit system to the next or use transit
   frequently. This is in direct contrast to MTA in NYC, which
   incentivizes frequent users and lets you use the same card for bus and
   subway travel. Amtrak in the Bay Area doesn't even run through SF and
   it is also extremely expensive and infrequent. It's really, really
   difficult to get to a lot of places here and almost always easier and
   cheaper to drive. I would not hold SF up as a paragon of good transit
   in any way. The only thing BART is good for is shuttling commuters into
   the city for high prices.

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6. 

   rossmoss Posted 12:00 pm
   15 Jun 2009

   D.C a metro allstar? clean? efficient?  DC Metro has routinely received failing grades year after year. Its always late, never clean.... grist please do better research

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7. 

   Emily at Sustainable Business Consulting Posted 2:37 pm
   15 Jun 2009

   The push for public transit is encouraging. Employee commuting is often a significant source of carbon emissions for businesses, and there’s a huge opportunity for businesses to lower these carbon footprints by locating near transit hubs and giving incentives to employees to use public transit.

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8. 

   EdwardPDX Posted 9:58 pm
   15 Jun 2009

   I find it hard to believe that Portland, Oregon, the city that leads the way on mass transit in the US and specifically light rail doesn't warrant a place your the top 10. 
   Portland inaugurated its three MAX light rail lines over 20 years ago,
   and has since integrated a street car and suburban commuter line
   (WES).  The system is set to expand substantially this year, and
   frankly puts cities like L.A. to shame.  We now build the cars that run
   on Phoenix's rails.  Most of the cities you list come to Portland first to see how its done.  Thanks, Grist for journalism by Wikipedia... 

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9. 

   stinkycheese Posted 5:27 am
   16 Jun 2009

   Don't worry--the article's titled "the best U.S. transit systems you never knew existed." Everyone knows that Portland's #1! Still, figured that Portland would get a shout-out in the first paragraph.

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10. 

    squier13 Posted 6:26 am
    16 Jun 2009

    Hi, You should include Norfolk, VA in this list.  Many of us in neighboring Richmond don't even know that Norfolk is hard at work building the first 7.4 miles of a light rail system. The Norfolk Tide will use the same Siemens Avanto vehicles found in Charlotte and Houston, and will operate in mixed traffic serving the waterfront area.  They are currently studying expanding the system to Virginia Beach a few miles away.http://www.ridethetide.com/

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11. 

    jessimonster Posted 8:46 am
    16 Jun 2009

    I'm suprised to see St. Louis on the list.  I have a lot of family in St. Louis, and once you get out of the down town area, there are no busses at all.  In fact, they don't even have sidewalks.  And the road system seems to be set up to encourage maximum driving.Although they couldn't afford to keep bus stops open to the outer edges of the city, and they don't bother to give their citizens side walks or bike lanes on their curvy, densly tree lined streets, they can afford to put a mile marker every .2 miles on every highway in the state.When peak oil gets bad, the people in the St. Louis metropolitan area are majorly screwed. I am glad to see Denver on the list though.  A guy I know was complaining about our public transportation system.  I believe I'll forward this to him in the effort to shut him up.  If he doesn't like Denver, I think he should leave.

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12. 

    StLGal Posted 7:43 pm
    17 Jun 2009

    JESSIMONSTER, I doubt you spent much time actually within St. Louis. What you describe sounds like the 'burbs. St. Louis has rich dense architecture and sidewalks galore. The buses and light rail extend way beyond the city limits. Yes, our transit system has experienced cutbacks (mostly in the far-flung suburban areas) and improvements could be made, but St. Louis is quick and easy to get around in with a usable transit system and is certainly walkable. We even have a strong biking community that is making headway all the time in improving bike lanes and routes. Come back and visit and this time actually spend some time in the city.

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13. 

    jessimonster Posted 12:37 pm
    18 Jun 2009

    Maybe I'm justs spoiled, because in Denver, busses and sidewalks extend out to all the suburbs.  If you live within an hours drive of downtown, you have busses.  And bike lanes.  And sidewalks.  It might take you a really long time to get, say, from Littleton to Aurora on the bus, but it can be done.  There is no way to get from St. Charles to Lake St. Louis on the bus (and St. Charles and Lake St. Louis are a heck of a lot closer to each other than Littleton and Aurora).  At least, there wasn't back in March, the last time I was there.I guess the real difference is, from what I understand, that people in Missouri don't really consider the suburbs to be part of your city's metro area.  There's nothing wrong with that, its just a different outlook on locality.  The distance between St. Charles and St. Louis is roughly the same as the distance between Littleton (where I live) and Denver, and yet, in Missouri, St. Charles is not really considered to be part of St. Louis, and in Colorado, Littleton is considered part of the Denver Metro Area.  Its all Denver.  When I go to Missouri, and I see a suburb of St. Louis, it just doesn't make sense to me that its not considered part of St. Louis, and given the same resources as it's mother city.  So what you see as a great system in the city (and it probably is), seems to me like a limited system that excludes a big portion of its citizens.  Its all matter of perspective, I guess.I sure wish when I came out there that I could spend more time in the city, because the city is undoubtably better than St. Charles (where most of my family lives) is.  Unfortunately, when I'm out there, I'm there to see family, and they usually have other plans for us.  Boring plans.  Plans that make me want to never go to Missouri again even though I know there sure are some beautiful and fun things to do in Missouri.Still, what will all those people in the suburbs of St. Louis do when peak oil gets bad?  They've got nothing!  Nothing but long twisty roads!  With no sidewalks (although, if its bad enough that there are no more cars, I guess that's not really a safety hazard anymore).

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14. 

    Design New Haven Posted 7:22 am
    19 Jun 2009

    New Haven, CT already has the busiest commuter rail line in the country, the highest % of employees who walk and bike to work of any city on the East Coast, and two Downtown train stations each serving thousands of suburban commuters. It is also one of the 10 busiest Amtrak stations in the country.The city is now lobbying for light rail lines to connect outlying parts of the city center.Maybe the great transit connections and hyper-walkability of the city is one reason why New Haven, CT and McAllen TX were the only two U.S. cities with 2009 employment growth, according to the Brookings report released this week.It is certainly the underlying reason why a developer is constructing a 36-story luxury apartment building downtown, across from one of the two train stations.Cities should invest in transit. It works! And according to the most recent U.S. Dept of Energy predictions, we're going to be in deep trouble if we don't.

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