The 12 major US cities with the best public transportation

Michael Semensohn / flickrA subway in New York, New York.New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared Thursday that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the New Jersey Transit, Long Island Rail Road, and the NYC subways, was in a "state of emergency." NYC's transit is long over-due repairs and suffers from over-crowding due to the city's ever-growing population.

But are the city's subways and buses really that horrendous compared to other cities?

Two nonprofit research institutes, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and TransitCenter Center for Neighborhood Technology, designed an objective "transit score" to answer just that.

The institutes created a metric called the AllTransit Performance Score for subways, light rails, bike shares, and buses in US cities and towns. Using open data from 7,236 cities, researchers looked at factors like affordability, access to jobs, frequency of service, quality, and number of stops. The goal is to encourage policymakers to improve public transportation.

The researchers compiled an ultimate ranking of public transportation in all of these cities and towns. On the site, you can filter by zip code and population.

Here are the top cities with at least 250,000 residents.