Honolulu workers have the best access to public transportation in the U.S., according to a new think tank survey released on Thursday.
The Brookings Institute, a Washington D.C. nonprofit, said Honolulu’s mass transit system — buses — are the most effective in the country at connecting workers with jobs in the metropolitan area of Hawaii’s capital. Commuters in the Los Angeles metropolitan area came in second with those in San Jose, California, El Paso, Texas, and San Francisco rounding out the top five.
The study comes on the same day that vocal rail critics filed a lawsuit against the city of Honolulu to stop a $5.3 billion rail project.
Here are some of the survey’s key findings:
- 97 percent of Honolulu’s working-age residents live “near a transit stop” compared to a naverage of 69 percent among 100 cities surveyed.
- Those who use public transit in Honolulu wait 9 minutes during rush hour, compared to the average wait-time of more than 10 minutes.
- In Honolulu, 60 percent of jobs are accessible by mass transit, compared to the average of 30 percent.
Check out the Brookings Institute’s graph-rich profile of Honolulu’s transit situation.
There’s also an interactive map so you can scope out the assessments of other cities.
From an article accompanying the 100 rankings:
“Transit coverage is highest in Western metro areas such as Honolulu and Los Angeles, and lowest in Southern metro areas such as Chattanooga and Greenville. Regardless of region, residents of cities and lower-income neighborhoods have better access to transit than residents of suburbs and middle/higher-income neighborhoods.”
The survey also found that Honolulu also had the largest share of jobs workers could reach within a 90-minute trip on transit, followed by Salt Lake City, Utah, and San Jose, Calif.
But in terms of the numbers of jobs a person could reach in 90 minutes, New York was first, followed by Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C., Brookings said.
Read more at Reuters.
