"In overall categories, Seattle ranked 7th in Accessibility and Convenience, 6th in Safety and Reliability and 3rd in Public Transit Resources. But combine all the scores and Seattle was No. 1."
When they can selectively pick and choose what measurements to use and report on, the results are automatically skewed.
Consider a few factors NOT included:
1. Number of transit routes
2. Number of transit route miles
3. Some kind of 'availability' calculation relating to weekday inbound seats vs population area served (ie, 1 inbound seat per 10 adult county residents)
4. Percentage of standees of total passengers
5. Commuter park-and-ride spaces per adult county resident (ease of finding a parking space)
6. Percentage of rolling stock cars less than 5/10/15/20/more years old (pleasant to ride)
7. And of course, average weekday passenger miles vs population served (1 passenger mile per 10/25/100 residents...ie what population percentage USES transit)
Those are just a few that pop into my head.
The supposed ranking reminds me of when I did a computer conversion project for the City of Detroit Police Department in 1974. One of the groups of programs was 'crime statistics reporting'. I laughed loudly when Mayor Coleman Young announced on TV that in the past 90 days, attempted rape had decreased by a big percentage, as had attempted murder. What he DIDN'T say was that -successful- rape and murder had gone UP in the same period! His report made it look like Detroit was on its way to becoming a 'nice place to live'.
The ranking reminds me, too, of a belief of Hitlers' head propaganda person (as best as I can remember what I read years ago) "If you repeat a big enough lie long enough and emphatically enough, it becomes a truth". Todays' version is called 'fake news'.