Talk:List of North American light rail systems

Renovated Page

And Done - it took me about a week, but this page is now fully renovated, with a fully reformatted and fully referenced table, as of today (August 25, 2013). Enjoy! --IJBall (talk) 05:10, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

San Francisco MUNI & F Wharves line

You claim the Muni Metro ridership statistics include the F Market Streetcars--why do you make this claim? None of your links backs up this unsupported claim, and no agency--not APTA, not Muni, not the SFMTA--actually tallies daily ridership on the F Market streetcars. There is no good reason to believe the heritage streetcars are included in Muni Metro ridership statistics, and that supposition should be removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:9:7B80:125:F053:E10C:DEDC:7493 (talk) 07:07, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Actually, I very clearly down the page say that I don't know if F-Market is counted in with Muni Metro by APTA or not. I honestly don't know. My question is - what is your source that APTA doesn't include it? F-Market is a regular operating transit line. It's clearly not going to be counted in with the Muni bus ridership. It's definitely Light rail. So my question is – how do you know that it's not counted in with APTA's Light rail stats for San Francisco? Do you have a cite for that that we can look up? Because I'd really like a definitive answer as to whether APTA counts it in or not, and if not why it's not counted... --IJBall (talk) 13:25, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

If one has no proof the F Market "heritage trolley" (an APTA term) is included in Muni Metro LRV ridership statistics as reported by the SFMTA to APTA, then there should be no claim made either way in this entry. Absent such proof, the unsupported claim should be withrawn. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:9:7B80:125:8139:9D57:1A06:56D7 (talk) 12:15, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

On the contrary - you are basically claiming that APTA (and SFMTA) is counting every Muni light rail and bus line's ridership in their figures except the F-Market line. Absent some proof of this claim, the assumption must be that F-Market is included. Otherwise we're to assume that APTA (and SFMTA) is selectively excluding the ridership from one single light rail line from its figures. Again, F-Market is a regularly operating (light rail) transit line - it operates 7-days-a-week, and is not a "free" sight-seeing line but a fare-requiring one. Until somebody can show me that APTA (or SFMTA) is selectively excluding just this one line (for no reason that I can fathom) from all of their other ridership statistics for S.F. Muni, I am going to assume it is included in Muni's Light rail ridership figures. If you can provide a reference that proves me wrong, please produce it. --IJBall (talk) 15:06, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

I am not "basically claiming" anything. Rather, I am challenging your explicit yet unsupported claim that F Market heritage trolley ridership is included in Muni light rail ridership statistics as reported by APTA. That is not obviously true, and in this discussion you admit you don't know for certain. Why, given the absence of any proof for such a claim (including the sources you purport) would you continue to rely on your unfounded assumption and have this Wikipedia entry remain the only source on the Internet claiming APTA's report combines F Market and Muni Metro ridership? Assumptions are not facts. Your explicit claim should be withrawn until we *do* know one way or the other.

We're talking past each other. Until you can show, by reference, that APTA doesn't include all Light rail lines in their numbers, I am going to assume they do. Since you seem to have such a problem with the last section on this page, I'll just delete that instead. And, no, I'm not going to withdraw the claim, until someone can show that APTA is explicitly not including this one line in their figures. --IJBall (talk) 22:16, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Update

I believe I have finally tracked down proof that should end this discussion, once and for all.

In Q2 2013, the APTA ridership figure for Muni Metro was 166,900.

On the Muni website, at the webpage of the accompanying reference, we find the following list and ridership figures:

J Church
K Ingleside/T Third Street
L Taraval
M Ocean View
N Judah
F Market & Wharves
TOTAL:

14,767
33,752
28,816
26,920
41,439
23,208
168,902

Now there is a discrepancy between the APTA figure and the Muni figure of 2,000 passengers, but that could simply be due to a typo somewhere in the ridership figures on this Muni webpage.

Regardless, it is clear that the only way you can get a number close to the APTA figure is if you include the F Market & Wharves ridership numbers in the total Muni ridership figure. Otherwise, without F Market & Wharves, the ridership figure is almost 25,000 passengers short, yielding a figure of only about 145,000, and no APTA ridership figure for "San Francisco Light Rail" (i.e. Muni Metro) has been that low since at least 2010.

Case closed. --IJBall (talk) 20:12, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Updated link for SFMTA (Muni) TEP data: [1] (click on 'Details' tab) --IJBall (contribs • talk) 20:16, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

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Need to remove the flags

C'mon IJBall, you should know that no one needs consensus to bring articles better in line with our guidelines. WP:WORDPRECEDENCE makes it clear we should prefer words—it doesn't matter how long flags have been in this article: their length of tenure doesn't give that formatting choice special weight over words in this extremely local case; it just means no one has come along and said, "Hey, why are we using country flags in a list of transit systems?" Also, you're actually mistaken: the article has not used flags "since the beginning": it's actually only used them since this edit five years after the article was created.

So really, given WP:WORDPRECEDENCE it seems clear that the party/ies arguing for the inclusion of the flags should be the ones needing to gain consensus since the default should be words and flags shouldn't have been introduced to start with. On top of that, definitely the abbreviation "USA" has to go as per MOS:US. As for "saving space", I will admit I've only eyeballed it and not gotten out my pixel ruler but the version with words is not looking like it's taking up more space to me.

As the guideline says, "Flag icons may be relevant in some subject areas, where the subject actually represents that country or nationality – such as military units or national sports teams." Transit systems? Not really widely understood as representing a country. WP:FLAGCRUFT specifically says "... placing a national flag next to something can make its nationality or location seem to be of greater significance than other things". So I'm not seeing any good argument here for why we are adding emphasis to the country in which a system is based. —Joeyconnick (talk) 20:44, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

It also says In lists or tables, flag icons may be relevant when such representation of different subjects is pertinent to the purpose of the list or table itself. I'd argue that is exactly the case here. In addition, the use of flags and abbreviations here was not a "trivial" choice – it was done to save room in the table, which why use of things like flag icons are often used in tables. Your way makes the table look like crap because of the "line wrapping" required to fit "United States" in – but a flag icon + either "USA" or "US" saves room in that column... Also, this practice is widely done at related articles – see: List of metro systems, List of tram and light rail transit systems, List of North American rapid transit systems by ridership, etc. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 20:55, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

It doesn't save any room... the widths are the same and the vertical height is the same because those rows already contain two or more lines with the inclusion of line lengths in metric and US customary. The only thing avoided is a line break for "United States" and if you really find that so objectionable, we could use "US" or "U.S." (without the flag) for the column. (Hopefully you will also give me credit for proposing "U.S." as a compromise since you know by now how much I love that styling for that abbreviation. 🙂)

Also, WP:OTHER is never a good argument because all that requires to avoid improving articles is one other article where someone is also misinterpreting a guideline. It's clear the use of flags puts undue nationalistic weight on the system's country of origin when the guideline makes it clear we should only be doing that if the subject represents the country/nation—which is clearly not the case with transit systems like subways, light rail, etc.—or the national origin is of particular relevance to the information being given (and given the table is default sorted by number of passengers, and includes other fundamentals like line length, that's also clearly not the case). At best you could argue these systems represent the cities or regions they serve and even then, you don't need a visual indicator to capture that when words will do.

You know, as I do, from editing TV-related stuff that articles or groups of articles can go years being non-compliant before someone stops by and says, "Uhm... let's fix this." The reaction to the person attempting to move the article closer to the guidelines should not be "*bam* revert!" and then a retrenchment appeal to "that's the way it's always been" or "that's the way it is on some other subset of pages!" It should be "Oh, thanks... yeah, we probably should follow our own guidelines more closely and not violate WP:CONLEVEL." —Joeyconnick (talk) 21:23, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

This will probably be my last comment on this, but the crux of this is that I feel you are misinterpreting the guideline. (There's also the issue that guidelines don't need to be followed if there's a good reason not to...) Anyway, WP:WORDPRECEDENCE is mostly concerned with article prose, which is why it specifically makes allowances for lists and tables. Well, guess what? – This is a list/table. As such, there really is not a good reason to remove flags from here, for the reasons I've outlined... But, I'll tell you what – if you can convince List of metro systems, an article with a lot more editors watching it, to dump their flags on the basis of WP:WORDPRECEDENCE, that'll be good enough for me, and we can remove flags from all related articles including this one! --IJBall (contribs • talk) 21:39, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Guadalajara's extension

@IJBall: Guadalajara's light rail was extended 1 km north to a new station named "Auditorio". It was opened last Friday (Nov, 23) as this local newspaper reports (sorry it's only in Spanish). You're right, the official website hasn´t updated their facts yet, however, you can check this project was on course in this one page and this other page, both in the official website of SITEUR (operator of the light rail). You can also track the opening in UrbanRail.

Greetings from Mexico,

--Aninonimo (talk) 02:07, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

@Aninonimo: The info can be updated, no problem, as long as there is some source (probably not UrbanRail, though) for the new figures like number of stations and system length. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 02:09, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

Update 2020 APTA report

With regards to the update maintenance tag I placed, I was planning on updating this table a while back with the 2020 APTA report (Q4 2019), but was unable to find similar corresponding figures for Guadalajara. Leventio (talk) 00:59, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I see now that is what you were angling for. I've added that info to the {{Update}} tag for clarity (an {{Update}} tag without a specific request for the updating is not useful to other editors...). But, yes – getting 2019 figures for the non-U.S./Canada systems will be a pain. It is probably still worth updating the U.S./Canada figures to Q4 2019. But not sure what to do about the rest... A general note: All of these transit article are holding the ridership figures to 2019, as transit ridership figures since COVID represent a substantial discontinuity and are likely not worth reporting in tables like these... --IJBall (contribs • talk) 04:20, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

Yeah I figured it (similar thing is happening with attendance figures for museum articles), and I definitely should have been more clear when initially placing that update tag. Saying that, I've managed to update all the transit figure to 2019 using the source above (barring the Mexican systems and the O-Train). Leventio (talk) 07:03, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

That's excellent. At the other articles similar to this one, we're now waiting for the Q4 2022 figures before updating again – the 2020 and 2021 figures are just too impacted by COVID to be useful. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 15:18, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

Q4 2022 figures

APTA's Q4 2022 figures are apparently out now, if anyone wants to update this article. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 17:09, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

Medellin, Colombia cable cars

As a tourist one yearns for information about the ownership and financial status of the cable car lines. It appears that a corporation owns the tourist line. Is it profitable? Are any other parts of the Medellin Metro fully or partly owned by private entities? 2800:484:1D7C:4B00:848D:D0:DAD9:5AC8 (talk) 07:25, 16 September 2023 (UTC)