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The basis of the figures is important to know. How much of the surrounding area counts as part of the system under discussion? In Los Angeles, there was both the city trolleys and the Pacific Electric. The PE alone was a 700 route mile system. Similarly, up in Boston, Bay State ran a 762 mile system while Boston Elevated ran a 229 mile system. Other systems into Boston had additional miles. Even little old Worcester, MA had a 251 mile system with Worcester Consolidated. In Philadelphia, you'd need to add up both the city trolley/subway - the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Co. (a 548 mile system), the suburban trolleys - the Philadelphia Suburban Transit Co., the New Jersey suburban trolleys run by Public Service of NJ into Camden, the Philadelphia and Western, and the extensive commuter rail systems of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Reading Railroad. The latter alone were another 300+ route miles.

This is what I mean by saying 170 miles in Houston was small. Most large cities had city and suburban rail systems of around 1000+ miles of trolley, interurban, subway/el, and commuter rail.

The basis of the figures is important to know. How much of the surrounding area counts as part of the system under discussion?

Traditionally cities are measured as "metropolitan regions," which in Houston's case makes for the Houston-Galveston Metropolitan area. There's no strict geographic rule of thumb dictating exactly what is involved but generally speaking it includes the urban county plus the geographically continguous suburban counties, or at least their closest parts. When measuring Houston I'm counting the roughly 100 miles of downtown-area streetcar tracks plus another 70 miles of interphased electric railway tracks that served a shipping terminal to the east near the San Jacinto river and that served the region between Houston and Galveston, among others. Put another way, that which was used for regional trips not to exceed more than about an hour in duration. I am not, however, counting passenger railway between Houston and, say, San Antonio.

The PE alone was a 700 route mile system. Similarly, up in Boston, Bay State ran a 762 mile system while Boston Elevated ran a 229 mile system.

That seems to explain the discrepancy. My figure includes a narrow definition of basically the trolley provider and its two electric railway extensions. Your figure includes virtually anything and everything in the city and surrounding areas that operates a rail-based form of passenger travel. Look at the streetcars and their immediate attachments alone and you get comparable figures. But if you're gonna add in virtually every passenger railway extension from Santa Monica to the region west of San Bernardino (an 80+ mile trip) or from Boston to Springfield, MA (a 90+ mile trip) I might as well throw in rail-based passenger service between Houston and Beaumont (85 miles) as had been available since the 1850's, Houston and Columbus (73 miles) as had been available since the 1860's, Houston and Brenham (70 miles) as had been available since the 1860's, and a whole string of other similar railroad connections. If I do that and list every single railroad out of Houston to any and every podunk town in a 100 or 150 mile radius, then yeah - I suppose I could add up 500 or 1000 miles of "service" too. But keeping it defined to the trolleys and their immediate interphased extensions gives us 170 miles which is about the same for other cities in that era using a similar measure.