[doady]

NJT ridership is kind of misleading, it does serve Philadelphia as well. But like 90% of ridership is NYC area so I guess it makes not much difference.

NYC area has good attitude toward rail transit, but not bus transit. Look at what happened to MTA Long Island Bus (now Nassau Inter-County Express).

Average weekday boardings, 2012

MTA New York City Transit - 11,050.7k
New Jersey Transit (New York and North Jersey only) - 786.0k
MTA Long Island Railroad - 324.4k
MTA Metro-North Railroad - 287.9k
Bee-Line Bus - 111.3k
Nassau Inter-County Express (2013) - 95.9k
Suffolk County Transit (2013) - 21.8k
=12,678.0k

TTC - 2,764.3k
GO Transit - 244.9k
Mississauga Transit - 183.0k
Brampton Transit - 114.2k
York Region Transit - 96.9k
Durham Region Transit - 49.5k
Oakville Transit - 11.8k
=3,464.6k

So NYC has 4x the population, and it has 4x ridership.

I don't think NYC is much different than the rest of the USA. There's still indifference to buses and bus riders (black people?). NYC just happens to have a massive rail system, including the biggest subway/metro system in the world, but even that's not enough to give it better ridership than Toronto.

 

[rbt]

Your figure of 5.7 million average weekday trips seems to come from here:
http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ridership/
Note that this number includes only subway trips.

< snip additional agencies >

Trips != customers; beware double counting.

I used just the subway numbers because under-count caused by persons taking other transit exclusively will roughly equal out over-count caused by persons taking 3+ trips. Happens to get pretty damn close to census numbers.

If you want to talk about the greater New York area,

The discussion was on modal share. Subsets of the urban area based on arbitrary and changeable political boundaries have no place in that kind of a discussion.

 

[Aldebaran]

This may or may not contribute to the conversation:

Source: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016...authority-bus-terminal-capacity-study/501515/

 

[denfromoakvillemilton]

Both cities can learn from each other.

 

[k10ery]

What a beautiful map. You've got to love New York.

 

[Johnny Au]

I find it surprising that Bayonne, NJ has more subway riders than Weehawken, NJ, despite Weehawken being across the Hudson from midtown Manhattan and Bayonne being across from Staten Island, the only borough without a subway line.