Is it Better to Work in the USA or Canada?

I joined the Facebook group NUMTOT, which stands for "New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens," after hearing about it for the first time. But this group had some big issues. It was cool because it was made up of people who liked towns and public transportation. The main one was that the ideas being pushed and shared were very old-fashioned Anglosphere planning ideas, which I think have often badly turned out.

Thanks a lot to Alon Levy for his great blog. Some of the things I don't agree with Alon are that he 1) knows a lot about other cultures and 2) is very critical of the way things are, especially in the US, where a lot of new transit has been built but not much of it has been used.North America based on cars There's no doubt that North America is a big part of what I talk about on my YouTube channel. I don't want to say that. There is a lot of urbanist speech on social media apps like TikTok and more YouTube channels like Not Just Bikes. This is making people have broken minds. Cities in Mexico are not at all like cities in Boston or Las Vegas. Cities in Boston also are not at all like cities in Mexico City.

But these towns are always put together

I won't go on and on about the urbanist chatter on social media in this piece (maybe in another?), but the "flattening" of a continent is making a trend greater that was already going on online. It's clear that Mexico is not the same as the US or even Canada. For example, buses made in Europe are used all over Mexico, and the country also has ETCS. That being said, I'm not going to talk about it because I'm not sure how important it is to the conversation.

Also, North America is not the United States.This is the trend among people who like and support public transportation: they think that the US and Canada are pretty much the same. This worries me a lot as a Canadian. To be clear, a lot of the people I've talked to at agencies (but these are people who usually take the time to come to Canada, so it's not a typical sample) and some well-known people in the American transit space, like Jarrett Walker, do try to tell them apart, but a surprising number of people don't. What a surprise! In the business world, there are lots of events, groups, and talks where companies from both countries get together and work together.

This is something that I think is very bad for Canada. "You are the average of the people you surround yourself with" is something I really believe. If transportation companies in Canada copy ideas from companies in the US that aren't doing as well, they will fall behind. In my field, trends have been slowly going north. These trends often seem like a waste of time and money. American agencies could learn something from Canadian agencies, which could be good. However, why would these companies be looked up to if they aren't really thought to be the best? In the same way, the US is known for not wanting to learn from other countries, especially Canada, which is seen as nothing more than an extension of the US.

British Columbia's Best Job

But the two nations are exceptionally diverse from one another. It's simple for me to conversation approximately the Pacific Northwest since that's where I developed up. But you'll make a parcel more from both. Fair see at the Pacific Northwest to see how distinctive the "quick" transport frameworks are in Vancouver, Portland, and Seattle. The prepare framework in Vancouver is much superior and goes through a parcel more arrive than the frameworks in Portland and Seattle. Indeed in spite of the fact that Vancouver's transportation lines cover less ground, a part more individuals utilize them than Portland's. As I've said for a long time, this ought to make individuals question Portland's notoriety for being "great on travel."  Portland made some nice-looking tram lines, but it's not easy to get a lot of people to ride them. This gap is also getting bigger faster: Seattle is adding to its Link light rail system and is already having trouble keeping 8–10 minute service gaps, but Vancouver is fine with 3–5 minute service gaps late at night.

Seattle is wasting good land by building huge parking lots next to new rail stops. Vancouver, on the other hand, is making stations bigger and adding taller buildings.

People riding bikes on American roads stayed the same in the 2010s compared to the years before Covid. But in Canada, the numbers grew a lot, and they are now crazy high.Monday through Friday, 19.4 riders in New York City and 112.7 riders in Toronto rode in the main city. Vancouver got 747.2 points, Los Angeles got 692.5 points, Montreal got 558.9 points, and Chicago got 484.4 points. The New Jersey Transit says that the best public transportation is in Philadelphia (297.3), Boston (283.9), San Francisco (242.8), Brampton (210.2), Edmonton (202.5), Seattle (1983.3), Miami (179.5), Ottawa (173.5), Calgary (171.2), Houston (170.9), Las Vegas (151.5), and Oakland (144.8).

It looks like more people use metro systems in Canadian cities than in any other city except New York (I'll talk about New York in a bit). This is true even though many American cities are much bigger and have even bigger systems. As a whole, Chicago has more people and a bigger fast transit system than Toronto. However, Vancouver has more transit riders than Chicago (Toronto beats Chicago by several times)! And the number of people who took the bus shows this, too. But what might be more interesting is that people from smaller Canadian places like Edmonton took the bus more than people from bigger cities like Seattle. That's CRAZY. Seattle's system is said to be one of the best in the US right now and is mostly made up of buses. However, a second-tier Canadian city like Edmonton can beat it. In Brampton, an area of Toronto, almost as many people take the bus as do in San Francisco. This is even stranger.