Comparing and ranking 250 cities around the world – “Good public transit connects people to places. Ideally, this is done efficiently and sustainably, with transit routes and stations serving and connecting the most amount of people possible. But in reality, there’s a lot of variation within and between cities in how effectively this is done. To look at this, we’ve created maps of major rail transit lines and stations (rapid transit, regional rail, LRT) overlaid onto population density for 250 of the most populated urban regions around the globe. Click the dropdowns below to view how well transit systems serve their populations in different cities. Each map has the same geographic scale, 100km in diameter, to be easily comparable with each other. Using these maps, we’ve also computed several metrics examining characteristics of transit oriented development, and ranked how well cities perform relative to each other. Generally, the greater the density and proportion of the population that lives near major rail transit, the better. Population data for these maps are from GlobPOP, and rail transit data are from OpenStreetMap. At the bottom of this page we describe these data sources, our methodology, and limitations in more detail…”