Cities with the best transportation in America

How easy it is to get around: public transit, traffic, walkability, bikeability, and commute times.

Other rankings

Overall Environment Safety Health Amenities Shops Education Quality of Life Cost of Living Employment

Top 25 cities

What transportation & commuting means here

Whether you can live without a car, how bad rush hour really is, whether transit runs often enough to rely on, and how safe it feels to cycle or walk. Residents tend to judge this on the trip they make every day, not on whether a subway system exists somewhere in the metro.

Why it's worth weighting

Commuting is the strongest predictor of day-to-day dissatisfaction in most surveys of where people live, and a car-dependent city quietly costs thousands a year in payments, insurance, fuel and parking. A short commute buys back hours every week that no amount of square footage compensates for.

What to check before you commit

1Test your actual commute at the actual hour. Off-peak drive times are meaningless.
2Check transit frequency, not just coverage — a bus line that runs hourly isn't really a transit option.
3Work out the true cost of a second car before assuming you'll need one, then see if a walkable neighbourhood at higher rent nets out cheaper.
4Look at whether the places you'd go weekly — groceries, school, gym — are reachable without driving.

How these rankings work

Every score comes from residents rating the place they live, not from an index we calculated. People score transportation & commuting from 0 to 10 alongside nine other life aspects, and write about what works and what doesn't. Each review is read by a person before it appears.

Cities are ranked on the mean of their transportation scores. Any city with at least one approved review is eligible, which means a highly-rated city with two reviews can currently outrank a well-known one with five — worth keeping in mind when reading the table above.

We're early. The rankings get more reliable with every review, so if you know one of these cities, add your own.