I think Anglophone countries tend to possess more individualistic traits, which is reflected in the legal code and then on subsequent urban development. But there are certainly divergencies, not just in use of public transport, but active travel (walking and cycling).
I’m not sure that being a resident of a 1mn+ metro provides clarity as to why one city has better/more heavily utilised transit infrastructure than another. I would have thought density would play a part, but going by citydensity.com (a very cool website, and worth playing around with), North American cities tend to drop off quite quickly in a rather uniform fashion. It’s also not like Canadian cities were immune from building large capacity roads through the core (e.g. Boulevard Ville-Marie in Montral and the Garnier Expressway in Toronto).
I would hazard a guess that the fundamental difference between American and Canadian cities is that the street environment is slightly less hostile, which makes accessing public transit less daunting. There could also be greater integration with other transit modes, as well as a service offering that is more comprehensive and of a higher quality.
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Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere
I mean the US also has 8x the population of Canada - it should be expected to have more and larger cities.
Canada for a country it's size (40 million) has a lot of very large cities. Even Countries like the UK and France, with 50-70% more people than Canada, don't have more than a handful of very large cities. Canada has Toronto at 7.5 million, Montreal quickly approaching 5, Vancouver at 3, then 3 more cities in the 1.5-2 million range. The UK has, what, London at 9 million, then Birmingham at 2.5, Manchester at 2, and Leeds at 1.5?
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Part of that is down to the liberal interpretation of what a city/urban area/metro is in North America and the lack of anti-sprawl measures. In contrast to Europe where there is a prevalence of tightly formed independent urban clusters and high-capacity regional rail networks. It’s why ‘large’ North American cities can come across as less active than ‘smaller’ European cities which are less diluted and have better connectivity over a wider area.
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Originally Posted by Crawford
This is true in all of Europe.
Britain still has no real HSR, they haven't electrified most of the main lines, grade separation is rare, etc. They're a relative laggard. Paris is building 120 miles of new subway while London has a epic celebration for a crosstown line where equivalents were built on the Continent 50-60 years ago. Munich and all the big German cities had Crossrail equivalents by about 1970.
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I think the UK rail market occupies a space somewhere in-between other Anglophone countries and that of other European countries. The UK certainly falls short in certain areas (e.g. the number of metro and tram networks across smaller urban areas) and it does have less electrification (40%, compared to 55% for France and Germany).
That said, there does tend to be a tendency towards turn-up-and-go frequencies (e.g. pre-pandemic there were 6tph from Birmingham and 5tph from Manchester at rush-hour into London) that aren’t common on the continent, and partly explains why the UK intercity network moves more people than its German and French peers. Another example, LNER which operates on the East Coast Main Line moves more people than the entire Spanish AVE HSR network which spans 4,000km. This of course underlines the critical need for HS2.
Crossrail technically wasn’t the first crosstown line in London, that was unintentionally the Metropolitan Line (opened 161-years ago), and more recently, Thameslink as well, but I’d agree that London probably needs several other cross-town lines, and a host of tram and metro networks across the country. Particularly in the context of a booming population in such a confined geographic area.