It turns out transit friendliness is a strong indicator of transit usage.

Our app Transit is used by millions of public transit riders in 130+ cities including Austin, Texas. We have data on billions of trips: origins and destinations, heat maps, bikeshare/carshare/rideshare bookings, etc.

We looked at anonymized origin data for 10,000+ of these trips around Austin, and compared it to Local Logic’s scores. Local Logic’s scores are legit — the “friendlier” a location is for public transit, the more trips that are taken from those spots.

X axis: transit friendliness (via Local Logic). Y axis: trip density (via our app).

What’s the significance? Our data suggests that there’s an exponential relationship between “transit friendliness” and the number of trips that actually get taken. Basically what that means is that by making a destination a bit more transit friendly you end up getting a lot more people taking transit.

Which means less people taking cars. Less traffic. Less stupid tweets.

Ridesharing is easy and convenient. It’s a fantastic complement to public transit. But it shouldn’t be the default mobility choice in the downtown core of a big American city.

If now is the time to have a conversation about mobility in Austin, might we suggest that next year, instead of having better ridesharing apps, we do something about the availability of public transit in downtown Austin?

Maybe it’s an overhaul of Austin’s transit network (à la Houston, which redesigned their system overnight, boosting ridership ~7% in one year). Or something way more ambitious…

With 50+ people moving to Austin each day and traffic spiralling out of control, it’s obvious that urban mobility will be one of the biggest issues facing Austin in the years to come. There’s reason to be optimistic: the city is already taking some fantastic measures to reduce the city’s dependency on cars — but that’s just the first step. Better public transit needs to be a policy priority.

So let’s find solutions that will silence the tech bros — once and for all.