How did Canada become more culturally public transit than the US?

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Our taxes are also much higher. Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. At the end of the day, you get what you pay for.

Not only that, but you don't burn US$ 1 trillion on military every year. Priorities...

[Crawford]

In 1969, the NYPD, angry about union salary/benefits negotiations, staged a work slowdown and revenge campaign, entitled "Fear City." The NYPD would tell visitors and suburbanites to go home, as their lives were in danger. They distributed pamphlets with lurid graphics, telling people that they would be harmed if they left their hotels, to never walk around at night, and definitely never, ever take the subway or public transit.

It sounds cartoonish and dumb, but it worked. Tourist bookings plummeted. Executives from Ohio who used to bring the wife for shopping and a Broadway show now traveled alone. Tourist-class hotels saw visits plummet, and many Times Square-area hotels shuttered. The subway and related transit had plummeting ridership. "Fear City" was likely the first and most effective campaign to scare Americans away from urbanity and transit.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Yuri

Not only that, but you don't burn US$ 1 trillion on military every year. Priorities...

Eh, no. Canada and Mexico don't spend much less on the military bc they have different priorities. They're (smartly) free riders. Someone in Calgary is essentially as secure from invasion as someone in Columbus.

[kool maudit]

Canada isn't the outlier, the US is. It dismantled its transit systems in the postwar storm of the interstates, racial turmoil, sprawl and all the rest. Canada is basically the same as Australia, New Zealand, Germany or whatever other country with regard to transit. The US made a radical move with its settlement and transportation patterns.

[Crawford]

Right, the questions about Canada, Australia and the like don't make sense. The U.S. is the huge global outlier.

As Anglosphere countries, Canada and Australia aren't exactly Japan or Germany. For whatever reason, Anglosphere countries don't seem to fully get transit. Even the UK has essentially a national diesel rail system 50 years after Europe electrified/grade separated all main lines.

But the U.S. stands alone, even in the Anglosphere, almost completely abandoning transit.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Eh, no. Canada and Mexico don't spend much less on the military bc they have different priorities. They're (smartly) free riders. Someone in Calgary is essentially as secure from invasion as someone in Columbus.

Free riders buying American military equipment... And no, Mexicans cannot rely on the US for their security. On the other hand, it's granted they'll have their government overthrow and replaced by a dictatorship if Washington decides that's good for them. But I digress.

As I said, it's a matter of priorities, preferences anyway. If I were an American taxpayer, I'd rather have let's say "only" US$ 300 billion on military and the other US$ 700 billion on infrastruture or welfare. But that's just me.

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Right, the questions about Canada, Australia and the like don't make sense. The U.S. is the huge global outlier.

As Anglosphere countries, Canada and Australia aren't exactly Japan or Germany. For whatever reason, Anglosphere countries don't seem to fully get transit. Even the UK has essentially a national diesel rail system 50 years after Europe electrified/grade separated all main lines.

But the U.S. stands alone, even in the Anglosphere, almost completely abandoning transit.

I feel like this divergence is widening, too.

The major cities of Canada, Australia and the UK are building or have recently completed multi-billion dollar transit megaprojects. There's almost nothing under construction in the US, given the size of the economy.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

I feel like this divergence is widening, too.

The major cities of Canada, Australia and the UK are building or have recently completed multi-billion dollar transit megaprojects. There's almost nothing under construction in the US, given the size of the economy.

Probably true.

It isn't like there's nothing u/c in the U.S. $100 billion is being spent on the Acela corridor upgrades, there's CAHSR, major subway/rail extensions in NY, LA, Bay Area, BRT and light rail proposed almost everywhere, etc.

But given that the U.S. economy is at this point significantly larger than the EU, on a relative basis it's basically nothing.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

I feel like this divergence is widening, too.

The major cities of Canada, Australia and the UK are building or have recently completed multi-billion dollar transit megaprojects. There's almost nothing under construction in the US, given the size of the economy.

Indeed. They are all moving on and the US seems to be stuck or at least underperfoming badly, specially as they have a lot to catch up.

And specifically about Britain mentioned by Crawford, they have this bad rap regarding railways. However, the number of interurban passengers there skyrocketed on the past 20 years and of course, HS2 and the big London transit upgrades. Things are moving there too.

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Some of those NYC subway pics are staged. The last one is infamous and staged. But yeah, whether or not it's staged is beside the point. To many Americans, that's the image of public transit.

Sure, it's just the whole image of the dark, dirty, dangerous city that pervaded throughout media in the 70s and 80s. And it wasn't all that overblown... in the early-mid 80s NYC subways were averaging like 300 reported felonies a week.

And at the same time, I remember in the mid 80s, how Toronto's safety was being marketed to Americans looking to take a trip to the city with their families. There were TV commercials, print ads, radio, and billboards that were basically conveying, "come have clean big city fun with polite, civilized, white people".

[hipster duck]

Some cities in the US actually have a lot of transit fixed capital, even by European standards, but it's completely going to waste.

Philadelphia is probably the best example. SEPTA regional rail has things like a 4-track underground line through downtown complete with major transfer stations. It basically has what Munich is spending 9 billion Euros to fix (it has a 2 track S-bahn tunnel through its downtown that's bursting at the seams, so they're building a neighboring 2 track tunnel to supplement it). It's relatively modern too; it opened in 1984. Even with infrastructure like this, and hundreds of miles of routes, SEPTA regional rail only carries 45,000 riders a day - which is what some bus lines carry in Toronto.

More recently, Denver built out a staggering amount of light and electrified heavy rail that it just runs infrequent commuter trains on to park-and-ride stations in industrial zones.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Yuri

And specifically about Britain mentioned by Crawford, they have this bad rap regarding railways. However, the number of interurban passengers there skyrocketed on the past 20 years.

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.

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by Yuri

Free riders buying American military equipment...

National security freeridership.

As Crawford said, Calgary is as safe from outside attack as Columbus is.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by pj3000

And at the same time, I remember in the mid 80s, how Toronto's safety was being marketed to Americans looking to take a trip to the city with their families. There were TV commercials, print ads, radio, and billboards that were basically conveying, "come have clean big city fun with polite, civilized, white people".

Yes, I remember those. In Metro Detroit, those commercials were constant in the 1990's, even. I still remember the dopey Delta Chelsea Hotel ads, to see Cats or Phantom, visit Casa Loma and shop with white people in the Eaton Centre. No clue if that hotel is still around but their U.S. marketing budget must have been enormous. Also nowadays the white people thing wouldn't work with Toronto.

[Yuri]

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.

They have HS1 with top speed of 300km/h. It's counted as high speed. And they have rails covering most of England with top speeds at 200km/h. Obviously not as impressive as Germany, France, Italy or Spain, but they're moving on regardless. Too bad they have so many issues regarding costs and it's not that simple to solve.

Regarding Crossrail, it seems very impressive. I was checking figures on Wikipedia, and the whole London Underground carried 1 billion passengers in 2022. Elizabeth Line alone got 200 million. A massive boost and it should be celebrated.

P.S. Regarding Munich, aren't they building a new tunnel threw city centre right now? They indeed have a massive system for a 2 million people metro area. Probably the most impressive for a city that size, but isn't this new one their actual crossrail?

Originally Posted by pj3000

National security freeridership.

As Crawford said, Calgary is as safe from outside attack as Columbus is.

And clearly you need US$ 1 trillion/year for that. Not one cent less...

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Eh, NYC is hugely anomalous. And I don't doubt, even in the NYC area, a very large number of people avoid transit due to typical U.S. negative associations. I've heard it, many times.

DC has a system designed in conjunction with federal employment centers, with strong top-down usage incentivization. Again, quite anomalous. And still not great ridership, compared to Canada or Western Europe.

And I'd argue Chicago and especially Philly are very much underperformers, in part due to race. Chicago and Philly with Vancouver or Toronto or London (UK) demographics would have much higher ridership.

My point is that the difference in transit usage/development within the United States does not show a strong bias towards places that have fewer minorities. Chicago may not be able to compare to similarly sized cities in Europe, but transit in Chicago quite easily blows away transit in almost any city in America that is not NYC.

Using the Jan 2024 data from APTA, I calculated a ratio of the trips per person for the 48 largest metros in the U.S. Here's the list of metros and their average trips per person:

Metros ranked by trips per resident

1. New York--Jersey City--Newark, NY--NJ: 148.9
2. San Francisco--Oakland, CA: 54.4
3. Boston, MA--NH: 47.4
4. San Diego, CA: 40.7
5. Seattle--Tacoma, WA: 36.9
6. Washington--Arlington, DC--VA--MD: 36.7
7. Chicago, IL--IN: 33.1
8. Philadelphia, PA--NJ--DE--MD: 32.7
9. Portland, OR--WA: 30.5
10. Los Angeles--Long Beach--Anaheim, CA: 29.8
11. Salt Lake City, UT: 26.7
12. Las Vegas--Henderson--Paradise, NV: 25.4
13. Baltimore, MD: 23.8
14. Denver--Aurora, CO: 22.9
15. Pittsburgh, PA: 20.3
16. Minneapolis--St. Paul, MN: 16.5
17. New Orleans, LA: 15.7
18. Milwaukee, WI: 15.6
19. Miami--Fort Lauderdale, FL: 14.8
20. Buffalo, NY: 13.9
21. Hartford, CT: 12.6
22. San Antonio, TX: 12.6
23. Phoenix--Mesa--Scottsdale, AZ: 12.1
24. Atlanta, GA: 11.9
25. Cleveland, OH: 11.5
26. Austin, TX: 11.3
27. Houston, TX: 10.0
28. San Jose, CA: 9.7
29. Orlando, FL: 9.6
30. Charlotte, NC--SC: 9.4
31. St. Louis, MO--IL: 9.1
32. Dallas--Fort Worth--Arlington, TX: 8.4
33. Providence, RI--MA: 8.1
34. Richmond, VA: 8.1
35. Tampa--St. Petersburg, FL: 7.5
36. Cincinnati, OH--KY: 7.4
37. Kansas City, MO--KS: 7.2
38. Sacramento, CA: 6.7
39. Columbus, OH: 6.6
40. Raleigh, NC: 6.3
41. Nashville-Davidson, TN: 5.7
42. Louisville/Jefferson County, KY--IN: 5.5
43. Jacksonville, FL: 5.0
44. Virginia Beach--Norfolk, VA: 4.4
45. Riverside--San Bernardino, CA: 4.1
46. Detroit, MI: 4.0
47. Indianapolis, IN: 3.5
48. Memphis, TN--MS--AR: 2.9

I then averaged the % population that is Black for all of these metros (16%). Then I looked to see if there was a correlation between low ridership and metros with a larger percentage of Black residents. To do that I just counted the Blacker than average metros and looked to see if they skewed to metros with lower trips per person. There was a slight skew towards lower ridership in Blacker metros, but by no means a dramatic skew:

Percent of Blacker than average metros by quartile
Top: 20%
Q3: 25%
Q2: 25%
Q1: 30%

The skew can also be easily explained by geography. All of the top ridership metros are on the (north) East or West coasts (plus Chicago). Metros in the northeast are just about evenly split between Blacker than average or not. Only one city on the (north) East Coast city shows up in the bottom half at all: Providence. But Providence has a below average Black percentage, and is pretty middle of the road among northeast metros for Black percentage, so this does not support the racism theory.

The bottom quartile is dominated by metros in the South and Midwest (but mostly South). Southern metros do skew Blacker than the rest of the country, but there doesn't seem to be a regional skew towards better transit usage in less Black metros. Like the other regions, it seems that the transit usage is kind of random:


Southern metros (percentage Black) listed by trips per resident

1. New Orleans, LA (33.3%) , trips per person: 15.7
2. Miami--Fort Lauderdale, FL (19.5%) , trips per person: 14.8
3. San Antonio, TX (7.1%) , trips per person: 12.6
4. Atlanta, GA (34.2%) , trips per person: 11.9
5. Austin, TX (7.0%) , trips per person: 11.3
6. Houston, TX (18.0%) , trips per person: 10.0
7. Orlando, FL (15.4%) , trips per person: 9.6
8. Charlotte, NC--SC (21.9%) , trips per person: 9.4
9. Dallas--Fort Worth--Arlington, TX (16.0%) , trips per person: 8.4
10. Richmond, VA (27.7%) , trips per person: 8.1
11. Tampa--St. Petersburg, FL (11.8%) , trips per person: 7.5
12. Raleigh, NC (18.3%) , trips per person: 6.3
13. Nashville-Davidson, TN (14.3%) , trips per person: 5.7
14. Louisville/Jefferson County, KY--IN (14.8%) , trips per person: 5.5
15. Jacksonville, FL (21.2%) , trips per person: 5.0
16. Virginia Beach--Norfolk, VA (30.3%) , trips per person: 4.4
17. Memphis, TN--MS--AR (45.8%) , trips per person: 2.9

New Orleans and Atlanta are among the Blackest metros in the south and they have higher transit numbers than some of the whitest metros. But Memphis and Virginia Beach are also among the Blackest metros and have pretty low transit numbers. So there's no clear correlation between race and transit usage even in this geography.

Anyway, I think racism (well racial segregation plus suburbanization) may have scuttled some of the more ambitious government led plans to build transit in the latter half of the 20th century, but that's pretty much the only time in history where that was probably true. To take Detroit as an example, which is a pretty glaring regional outlier at the bottom of the list of trips per resident, that was a city with one of the most expansive rail transit systems in the world in the mid 20th century. The reason that no longer exists was a policy decision, and it was a very unpopular decision among Detroit residents of all races at the time.

So, I somewhat strongly disagree that racism is the fundamental reason that this country has fallen behind on mass transit. I think the fundamental reason has to do with policy and, to a lesser extent, historical precedent. The historical precedent is that the federal government did not/does not view mass transit as a prerogative of the federal government, so there is no national standard of mass transit. That has led state and local governments to decide on their own how much of their resources to dedicate to mass transit. I suspect that the Canadian government has fostered more of a national consensus on mass transit.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

I should point out that Canada did have slavery, just not the widespread slavery seen in the Southern US. That's mainly because, like the Northern US, we didn't have the type of agriculture that was conducive to it. And it also ended much sooner, probably in part since there was less economic incentive to continue it.

The British ended slavery throughout the empire in the 1830s and that's when it ended in Canada. But yes, there were no cotton, sugar or rice plantations in Canada, which is where most of the slaves in the United States were put to work.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by Yuri

Not only that, but you don't burn US$ 1 trillion on military every year. Priorities...

Come on. The U.S. military and its budget is by no means a waste of money. The alternative is what existed for hundreds of years prior to 1945.

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Yes, I remember those. In Metro Detroit, those commercials were constant in the 1990's, even. I still remember the dopey Delta Chelsea Hotel ads, to see Cats or Phantom, visit Casa Loma and shop with white people in the Eaton Centre. No clue if that hotel is still around but their U.S. marketing budget must have been enormous. Also nowadays the white people thing wouldn't work with Toronto.

Oh yeah, definitely into the 90s. Seemed to kick into an even higher gear when the Blue Jays started getting really good and the SkyDome opened.

[Innsertnamehere]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

I should point out that Canada did have slavery, just not the widespread slavery seen in the Southern US. That's mainly because, like the Northern US, we didn't have the type of agriculture that was conducive to it. And it also ended much sooner, probably in part since there was less economic incentive to continue it.

Whether or not Canada is or was less racist is hard to quantify. Racism certainly shaped, and continues to shape, the experiences of Indigenous people. But Black and Indigenous people currently and historically make up a much smaller percentage of the population compared to Black US so there are fewer such people to be racist toward. But there definitely are examples of very racist treatment toward Black people throughout our history. There's info on the history of discrimination and segregation here.

Canada was no less racist than the US - there is a litany of government policies which were very racist in the first half of the 20th century here.

The difference is that Canada simply didn't have large populations of minorities in the country until it removed racial screening on immigration in the late 1970's.

"White Flight" can't happen if there aren't any minorities to run away from.