Good point - I found this a confusing analysis without digging much into what it was saying - Urbana and Athens were high on the list...why? Do they have public bus systems that students use extensively? If so, that would tend to give a false impression of how much public transit is used there. I liked that he later pulled apart the small and large cities, but it would have been nice to understand what the data was saying in the context of the cities it examined.
Your point on Chicago is well taken - I was surprised to see SF/Oak ahead of it, as they "feel" harder to navigate with transit only, but I was forgetting that the suburbs are included in Chicago, which is basically impossible once you leave the city limits.
Yes, college towns often have great public transit usage because students ride for free, the school pays the local agency or runs their own vehicles, and you have a lot of young people without cars.
Ann Arbor, MI (#20) is a great example where University of Michigan runs a fleet of buses that puts many small cities' systems to shame. Lafayette, IN (#30) is partially supported by serving Purdue University. Bloomington, IN (#40) has two bus systems - the city's, and Indiana University's. (Disclaimer: these are all customers of DoubleMap.)
Not sure why you think it would be a false impression - public transit is used a lot in college towns.
State College, PA is where Penn State University is located. Even if you drive to the university as a student you still need to take a bus to get to class. That makes around 45,000 students using public transportation everyday.
Yeah, I was very surprised to see Athens, GA in the top 5. I was not even aware that they had a substantial public transit system and I lived in GA for ~15 years.
You are probably mentally discounting bus infrastructure. Busses are much more prevalent than people think but their demographic skews much lower on the economic scale than other transit options (often because they are abysmally slow).
#2 is called this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffon%27s_needle. This is also mentioned in Jordan Ellenberg's book How Not to Be Wrong, and has a similar passage with your explanation above. I mention the book as much because it's a great read.
Yeah - It seems strange that the early parts of the article try to paint him as one who has failed but still overcome adversity. It is challenging to argue that at any point he wasn't very, very successful.
It would seem more appropriate to point out that despite his tremendous capabilities, he still has faults and has experienced awful tragedy. The article veers that way towards the end.
Sounds like good people; glad to read about someone with substantial means helping drive education and science.
Good point. I suspect that the author is accustomed to a certain narrative - triumph over adversity - or, believes news readers are more keen to that kind of story.
