hi it's me caltrain, serving santa clara and growing 2x in 15 years

https://nationaltransitdatabase.org/california/peninsula-cor...

Interesting to note that counting rides by a bounded geographic area is going to miss a lot, as the caltrain data doesn't seem to be represented in the santa clara data.

Also, the Austin data doesn't take into account that the city regularly expands its geographic boundaries (typically east and west) which may artificially make it seem as if it is increasing riders when it is simply absorbing them.

In 15 years, how much has road usage grown and how much has population grown? Just a 2x increase seems like a relative decline.

SF hasn't grown by anywhere near 2x in 15 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco%E2%80%93Oakland%...

True, but tech jobs have grown more than 4x:

Since the current expansion started in 2010, the San Francisco tech industry has more than quadrupled in size to 100,644 tech jobs as of year-end 2018.

https://www.globest.com/2019/11/13/san-francisco-has-second-...

I didn't fact-check all of your links, but the first two that I randomly selected showed transit usage increasing over time.

I bet Massachusetts ridership wouldn't be down if they weren't experiencing crippling infrastructure atrophy.

They spent all their money on a tunnel under Boston so their infrastructure has 30ish years of deferred upgrades.

Right but "good public transit" in the context of a Citylab article means "spends a lot of tax dollars on public transit."

I don't seem to recall a lot of private roads and highway in the USA? Most of them were public (tax dollars) and when they improve them, politics calls it a "good" improvement.

That's what "public" means. It's an investment in economic development and externality reduction.