Los Angeles has spent thirty-six years and tens of billions of dollars building a rail network, and the neighborhood where the most people actually ride transit to work has one station on it.
27.38 percent of Westlake's commuters travel by public transportation. That is the highest share of any of the 272 neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, and it is more than double downtown's 13.45 percent. It is not close, and it is not a rate artifact: Westlake puts 12,420 people on transit to work against downtown's 3,576.
Downtown has eight Metro rail stations, four rail lines and 4,290 scheduled train departures on a weekday. Westlake has one station, where the B and D lines stop under MacArthur Park, and 412.
The ranking
| # | Neighborhood | Transit share | 90% interval | Riders | Rail stations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Westlake | 27.4% | 25.5 to 29.3 | 12,420 | 1 |
| 2 | Pico-Union | 23.7% | 20.4 to 27.0 | 3,948 | 0 |
| 3 | Koreatown | 21.4% | 19.7 to 23.1 | 10,184 | 3 |
| 4 | Harvard Heights | 20.0% | 16.2 to 23.9 | 1,424 | 0 |
| 5 | East Hollywood | 19.9% | 17.0 to 22.8 | 5,396 | 3 |
| 6 | Historic South-Central | 16.1% | 14.0 to 18.3 | 3,007 | 3 |
| 7 | Arlington Heights | 15.0% | 12.4 to 17.6 | 1,166 | 0 |
| 8 | Leimert Park | 13.9% | 9.4 to 18.4 | 618 | 3 |
| 9 | Downtown | 13.5% | 11.4 to 15.5 | 3,576 | 8 |
| 10 | Adams-Normandie | 12.7% | 8.6 to 16.8 | 921 | 0 |
Downtown does not appear until ninth, and three of the eight above it have no Metro rail station at all. Harvard Heights is fourth in Los Angeles County on transit use and not one of its residents lives within a half mile of a train.
Westlake is first, and the data can separate it from everything except its neighbor
The twelve highest neighborhoods, each with the 90% confidence interval the Census Bureau's own margins imply. Downtown is ninth.
The intervals in that table are the point of it. These are American Community Survey estimates, and a rank without an interval around it is a claim the data has not earned. Westlake's clears Koreatown's and everything below it. The one neighborhood it overlaps is Pico-Union, which is directly next door and has no rail station either.
The riders live west of where the lines meet
The map is the argument. Metro's six rail lines converge on downtown from every direction. The neighborhoods that ride are the tight dark cluster sitting a mile and a half to the west of them, along Wilshire and Sixth and Olympic, where the trains mostly are not.
The rail network meets downtown. The riders live west of it.
Share of commuters who travel by public transit, by neighborhood, over Metro's six rail lines. City of Los Angeles neighborhoods only; the six rail lines are drawn in full and run beyond the city.
Downtown has ten times the service and a third of the riders
| Downtown | Westlake | |
|---|---|---|
| Metro rail stations | 8 | 1 |
| Weekday rail departures | 4,290 | 412 |
| Metro bus stops | 361 | 174 |
| Weekday bus departures | 67,961 | 20,329 |
| Bus departures per 1,000 residents | 980.6 | 190.4 |
| Residents within a half mile of rail | 85.2% | 54.9% |
| Transit commuters | 3,576 | 12,420 |
Downtown holds 27.2 percent of every scheduled train departure inside the city limits. It has five times Westlake's bus service per resident. On every measure of what Metro actually runs, downtown wins by a wide margin, and it produces a third as many transit commuters.
Put the two numbers together and you get a figure that is crude but hard to look away from. Westlake returns 30.1 transit commuters for every scheduled train departure. Downtown returns 0.83.
The obvious objection is that downtown walks, and it does
Downtown residents live where the jobs are. A carless person in Bunker Hill does not need a bus to reach an office six blocks away, and the census records that person as a walker, not as evidence of anything about transit. So the fair test is not transit alone. It is everyone who got to work without driving.
| Downtown | Westlake | |
|---|---|---|
| Traveled by transit | 13.5% | 27.4% |
| Walked | 17.5% | 6.2% |
| Cycled | 1.0% | 0.7% |
| Did not use a car | 31.9% | 34.3% |
| Drove alone | 57.5% | 51.9% |
| Worked from home | 28.8% | 11.2% |
Downtown walks nearly three times as much as Westlake, and Westlake still finishes ahead on the combined measure. It is 4th in the county on car-free commuting and downtown is 6th. The objection is real, it moves the gap from 14 points to 2, and it does not change the answer.
The working-from-home row is the one to notice. 28.8 percent of downtown's workers never left the house, against 11.2 percent of Westlake's. That is the reason every share on this site divides by people who actually made a trip. Divide by all workers instead, the way most published commute figures do, and downtown gets credit for a quarter of its workforce staying in bed.
Ninety-two percent of it is the bus
| Mode | Westlake | Downtown |
|---|---|---|
| Bus | 91.5% | 62.7% |
| Subway or elevated rail | 7.1% | 31.0% |
| Commuter rail | 0.8% | 4.6% |
| Light rail | 0.7% | 1.6% |
Westlake's transit is a bus system. 11,360 of its 12,420 riders are on one, and they board at 174 stops served by lines that mostly run east and west across the city: the 16, the 18, the 20, the 720 down Wilshire. The single busiest transit neighborhood in Los Angeles County is a bus neighborhood with a subway stop in it.
This is the part with the clearest consequence. Metro's rail program is capital, visible, and measured in decades. Its bus network is operating expense, and it is the thing being cut when the operating budget is short. The NextGen Bus Plan restructured that network in 2021 on the argument that frequency mattered more than coverage. Whatever else is true of that argument, the neighborhood it matters most to is this one.
What actually predicts who rides
Across the 132 neighborhoods with an estimate solid enough to rank, the correlation between transit use and the share of households with no car available is +0.82. Population density is +0.81. Median household income is -0.60.
Proximity to rail is +0.46 across the 72 city neighborhoods where we can measure it, and the raw count of scheduled train departures is +0.30, the weakest of the five.
Rail access barely predicts who rides. Not owning a car predicts it well.
Each dot is a neighborhood. Vertical axis on both panels is the share of commuters traveling by public transit.
The thing Los Angeles has spent thirty years building is the weakest predictor on the list of who uses the thing it built.
That is a correlation and not a cause, and it cannot tell you which way the arrow runs. People without cars may move to where the buses are, or people who live where the buses are may find they can go without a car. Both are happening. What the number does establish is that a map of Los Angeles transit ridership is mostly a map of who cannot afford to drive, and only slightly a map of where Metro laid track.
Westlake is the biggest exception in Los Angeles, in both directions
Fit a line through car access and transit use and ask which neighborhoods sit furthest off it. Westlake is the largest positive residual in the county, 8.2 points above what its car ownership predicts. Downtown is the second largest negative, 6.7 points below.
The largest negative is University Park, which is wrapped around USC and is 11.5 points below the line, and the third is Westwood, which is wrapped around UCLA. That is the same pattern: a neighborhood full of people with no car who do not need transit, because they already live at their destination.
Downtown belongs in that category more than it belongs in a story about failure. 32.4 percent of downtown households have no car, which is higher than Westlake's 30.8 percent. Downtown is not a place that rejected transit. It is a place where a third of households gave up a car and then walked, because downtown is the destination the whole network was built to reach.
Westlake is the opposite. It is the densest neighborhood in Los Angeles County at 39,290 people per square mile, its median household income is $49,983 against downtown's $69,911, and its residents are going somewhere else to work. They are the ones on the bus.
What this is not
It is not a ridership count. Every figure here is residents of a neighborhood who commute by transit, wherever they board. It is not boardings at stops inside the neighborhood, and in a place that hundreds of thousands of people pass through daily those are very different numbers. Downtown's stations are among the busiest in the system and nothing here disputes that. The question is who lives above them.
It is not an argument against rail. A hub carries service for everyone who passes through it, not for the people living on top of it, and a network with evenly distributed trains would be a network that goes nowhere. Downtown's eight stations are doing a job that this measure cannot see.
It is only commuting. The census asks how you usually got to work last week. It says nothing about trips to school, to a clinic, to a store or on a weekend, which together are most transit trips, and it records one usual mode per person, so somebody who rides a bus to a train counts once. The bus and rail split here is a split of primary modes, not of boardings, and it will undercount rail's part in a linked trip.
It is one photograph. These are the 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates, a window that covers the years transit ridership was recovering from a collapse. There is no trend in this piece because there is no trend in this data.
Method
Commute mode is table B08301 of the American Community Survey, 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates, at census tract level, apportioned by area onto the 272 Mapping L.A. neighborhood lines that every other Basin neighborhood figure uses. Car access is table B08201. Stations, stops and scheduled departures come from LA Metro's own GTFS feeds, joined in an earlier piece and reused here unchanged.
The denominator is commuters who left the house, not all workers. Since 2020 the ACS universe for commute mode includes people who worked from home, and working from home is concentrated in a way that would bend this map: 28.8 percent in downtown against 11.2 percent in Westlake. pct_transit_workers ships beside every figure because it is what everybody else publishes, and it is lower everywhere.
Only 132 of the 272 neighborhoods carry a rank. The rest have fewer than 500 commuters or a coefficient of variation at or above 30, and they keep their figures but not a position. This is not a formality. Ranked on the point estimate alone, the second highest transit neighborhood in Los Angeles County is the Veterans Administration campus in West Los Angeles at 25.5 percent, which is 47 people out of 184 with a 90 percent confidence interval running from negative 9.0 to 60.1. It is unranked here, and it is the reason the screen exists.
The apportionment was tested rather than trusted. Splitting tracts by area assumes households sit evenly inside them, which they do not. So the whole panel was rebuilt under a cruder rule with no splitting at all, every tract assigned whole to whichever neighborhood holds most of it. Across the 248 neighborhoods comparable both ways the transit share moves a median of 0.06 percentage points, and the top five come out as the same five in the same order. The largest move anywhere in the county is West Compton, from 6.04 to 9.62 percent.
One number in this file does not sum the way you would expect, and it is published rather than smoothed. The ACS estimates bus, subway, commuter rail and light rail separately from the public transportation total they belong to, so they do not always add up: 58 of the 2,057 county tracts with any transit commuter disagree, 2,049 people, 1.12 percent of the county total. That gap is carried as its own column. Westlake and downtown both reconcile exactly, so no figure in this piece depends on it.
tools/transit-use/02_verify.py recomputes every claim above off the written file. Eighteen checks, none failing, none warning, including the two that decide whether the headline stands: Westlake beats downtown at 99 percent confidence, z = 8.09, and it does so on a tenth of the rail service.
One more number
The five neighborhoods that send the most people to work on transit are Westlake, Koreatown, East Hollywood, Hollywood and Pico-Union. Together they hold 31.1 percent of every transit commuter in the City of Los Angeles on 2.7 percent of its land.
Between them they have nine Metro rail stations. Downtown has eight, and one tenth of their riders.