USA vs. Canada Transportation and Infrastructure

I recall joining the Facebook group NUMTOT, which stands for "New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens," after learning about it for the first time. This group was cool since it was made up of people who like cities and public transit, but it had some serious issues. The main one was that the perspectives being discussed and pushed were very classic Anglosphere planning notions, which I feel have frequently resulted in negative effects.

Many thanks to Alon Levy for his fantastic blog. I don't always agree with Alon, but I appreciate that he is 1) very knowledgeable about various cultures and 2) very critical of the way things are, particularly in the United States, where a lot of new transit has been built in recent years but little of it has been used.North America centered on automobiles Regardless of how you look at it, North America is an important component of what I write about on my YouTube channel. I hate having to say that. People's minds have been shattered as a result of the growth of YouTube feeds like Not Just Bikes and the proliferation of urbanist rhetoric on social media platforms like TikTok. Vancouver, British Columbia is not like Mexico City, Boston, or Las Vegas.

However, these cities are frequently clubbed together and named "car-centric North America."

I'm not going to whine about the urbanist rhetoric on social media in this essay (maybe in a later one), but the "flattening" of an entire continent is amplifying an already existing trend online. Mexico is clearly distinct from the United States and, most likely, more so than Canada. But I won't discuss it because, to be honest, I don't think it plays a significant role in the discourse.

By the way, Canada is not the United States.When it comes to public transportation, I'm referring to the trend of transit enthusiasts and fans believing that the United States and Canada are essentially the same. As a Canadian, this certainly disturbs me. To be clear, many people I've spoken with at agencies (but these are people who usually take the time to come to Canada, so it's not a representative sample) and some well-known figures in the American transit space, such as Jarrett Walker, make an effort to distinguish between them, but a surprising number of people don't. This should come as no surprise given the number of events, groups, and speeches in the industry where agencies from both countries interact and collaborate.

I believe that this is a really bad thing for Canada. I believe the adage "you are the average of the people you surround yourself with" is accurate. This means that many Canadian transportation agencies are lagging behind because they adopt ideas from underperforming American agencies. Trends in my profession have been progressively going north, and many of them appear to be a waste of time and money. It could be beneficial for American agencies, which could learn from Canadian ones. But why would these agencies be held up as examples if they aren't considered exceptional? Similarly, the United States is known for its unwillingness to learn from other countries, particularly Canada, which is frequently viewed as little more than an extension of the US.

SkyTrain in Vancouver.

Be that as it may, the nations may not be more distinctive. For case, I appreciate talking around the Pacific Northwest since it is where I developed up. Be that as it may, there are numerous more that can be made from both areas. In case you need to see how diverse the "quick" travel frameworks in Seattle and Portland are from Vancouver's SkyTrain, fair see to the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver's rail framework is distant prevalent to that of Portland and Seattle, covering essentially more ground. Vancouver has altogether more travel riders than Portland, in spite of the reality that its travel courses cover less ground. This, as I've long contended, ought to call into question Portland's notoriety for being "great on travel."  Portland was brilliant at creating visually appealing tram lines, but persuading people to ride them was another matter. This disparity is also widening: whereas Seattle is expanding its Link light rail system and is already struggling to maintain 8-10 minute service intervals, Vancouver is still getting by with 3-5 minute intervals late at night.

Seattle is making a mistake by building massive parking lots on precious land adjacent to new train stations. Vancouver, on the other hand, is erecting tall skyscrapers and increasing station size.

Ridership on American routes remained constant in the 2010s compared to previous years, but it increased significantly in Canada, and the numbers after Covid are staggering.The average number of riders every weekday in the main city is 19.4 in New York and 112.7 in Toronto. Vancouver received 747.2, Los Angeles got 692.5, Montreal got 558.9, and Chicago earned 484.4. The following cities have the best public transportation, according to the New Jersey Transit: 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.

This graph demonstrates that Canadian cities now have the most metro riders outside of New York (more on New York later), despite the fact that many American cities are much larger and have far larger systems. Regionally, Chicago has more population than Toronto AND a far larger rapid transit system, but Vancouver has more transit riders than Chicago (Toronto outperforms Chicago by several times)! This is also demonstrated by the number of bus riders, but what may be more noteworthy is that smaller Canadian cities, such as Edmonton, had more bus riders than larger cities like Seattle. THAT IS CRAZY. Keep in mind that Seattle's system is primarily built on buses and is regarded as one of the greatest in the United States right now, yet a second-tier Canadian city like Edmonton can outperform it. Even stranger, the number of bus riders in Brampton, a Toronto neighborhood, is nearly as high as in San Francisco.