Every few years, a mid-sized city announces a transit plan modelled closely on the capital’s — and every few years, ridership falls short of projections because the underlying assumptions never fit.
The capital’s system was built around a dense, mixed-use core with commuting patterns that simply don’t exist in most smaller cities, where trip origins and destinations are far more spread out.
Smaller cities need transit plans built around their own commuting patterns, not scaled-down versions of a much larger system. That means starting with where people actually travel, not with a route map borrowed from elsewhere.
A handful of mid-sized cities that took this approach — building smaller networks around their own commuting data — have seen ridership grow steadily rather than disappoint in year one.
The lesson isn’t that smaller cities should think smaller. It’s that they should think differently, using their own data rather than borrowing someone else’s blueprint and hoping it transfers.
