Travelers tend to think of public transit as a chore — something you tolerate to get from your hotel to a museum. We think of it as one of the most enjoyable parts of any trip, and the cities with the best transit are reliably the cities with the best neighborhoods.
The relationship is causal in both directions. Cities with great transit develop great neighborhoods, because density and walkability follow station access. And great neighborhoods attract the political will to build great transit, because residents want to be able to move between districts without driving.
Tokyo’s rail network is the best in the world by every measure, and it produces the best urban texture in the world. Paris’s metro is dense enough that no neighborhood is more than 500 meters from a station. Vienna, Berlin, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, Madrid — all have transit systems that allow you to live and travel without ever needing a car.
The cities with notoriously bad transit — Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, most of the Sun Belt — correspondingly have weaker neighborhood character. Their best neighborhoods (Silver Lake, the Heights, the Old Fourth Ward) feel like islands.
Our advice: when you visit a new city, try to use the public transit system as much as possible. Buy a multi-day pass. Read the network map over coffee. Ride a line you don’t need to ride, just to see where it goes. You will understand the city in a way that taxis can never match.