American Transit and Canadian Transit are Different

Transit fandom is undoubtedly a positive thing, but sometimes it's counterproductive.

First, some background…

I remember when I first got into online transit discourse through the Facebook Group “New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens”, better known as NUMTOT. This group was cool because it was a place with people who were passionate about cities and public transport, but it had some serious issues — I’d say the biggest being that the views being shared and promoted were incredibly orthodox Anglosphere planning ideology which I think has so often delivered poor results.

Alon Levy’s blog is the perfect antidote to NUMTOT, and obviously I don’t agree with Alon on everything, but what I appreciate is that Alon is 1) incredibly worldly 2) super critical of the status quo — especially in the United States where so much transit has been built in the last several decades and so little of it has gotten significant use.

Car Centric North America

For better or for worse, North America is a big part of what I cover on my YouTube channel — but I hate that I feel like I need to say North America. The emergence of YouTube channels, including but not limited to Not Just Bikes, and the expanded social media urbanist discourse on apps like TikTok has broken people’s brains. Vancouver, BC is nothing like Mexico City, Mexico City is nothing like Boston, and Boston is nothing like Las Vegas — and yet constantly they are now all being grouped together and called “car-centric North America”.

Now, this article is not me ranting about the urbanist discourse on social media (future article perhaps?), but this “flattening” of an entire continent is boosting a trend that was already developing online. I won’t be talking about Mexico because I’ll be honest I have less strong feelings about its role in the discourse, but it is obviously also distinct from the US and probably more so than Canada (Mexico uses buses from European manufacturers all over and is using ETCS!).

Canada is not the United States (on transit)

The trend I am referring to (and obviously as a Canadian I will be especially bothered by this) is that of transit advocates and enthusiasts treating the US and Canada as being generally the same when it comes to public transit. Now, to be clear, many people I’ve interacted with working at agencies (but, then again these are people who generally take the time to come to Canada so it’s not a representative sample) and some prominent figures in the American transit space do make a real effort to distinguish between them — such as Jarrett Walker — but a surprising amount do not. This isn’t necessarily surprising as so many industry events, organizations and things like talks exist with agencies from both countries intermingled.

I think this has a very negative effect — particularly for Canada. The old adage “you are the average of the people you surround yourself with” is in my opinion quite accurate, and that means a lot of Canadian transit agencies are being dragged down by getting ideas from much worse performing American ones. I’ve seen industry trends creep their way north, and so often they feel like ones which waste resources and time. The effect is possibly positive for American agencies who might learn a thing or two from Canadian agencies, but if these agencies really aren’t being recognized as being exceptional, why would they be looked on as exemplars? At the same time, the US in general has a reputation for being closed off to learning from the rest of the world, especially Canada that is often seen (beyond transit) as just being like an extension of America.

Vancouver SkyTrain.

But, on transit the countries could not be more different. I love to use Pacific Northwest examples because they are the ones I grew up with but there are many to be made across the two countries. Looking at the Pacific Northwest, you need only compare the extents of the Seattle and Portland’s “rapid” transit systems to Vancouver’s SkyTrain, Vancouver is not as rich as Portland and significantly less rich than Seattle, and yet its rail system is substantially more extensive and higher quality. Comparing to Portland, Vancouver has less rail transit mileage but several times more passengers, which as I’ve long said should make people question Portland’s “good on transit” reputation. Portland was certainly good at building “aesthetically pleasing” tram routes — getting riders on them en mass is another story. This divergence is accelerating as well: while Seattle is expanding its Link light rail system and already struggling with maintaining 8-10 minute service frequency, Vancouver is still happily chugging away with service every 3-5 late into the night. And while Seattle is foolishly building huge parkades on valuable land next to new rail stations, Vancouver is putting up high rises and expanding stations.

When you looked at ridership trends pre-Covid, American systems were stagnant in the 2010s, but Canadian ridership was growing significantly, and the numbers post-Covid are just nuts.

What you can see here is that non-New York metro ridership (I’ll talk about New York shortly) in the US and Canada is now dominated by Canadian cities — even though many American cities are significantly larger, and sometimes even have bigger systems. Chicago has a large population regionally than Toronto AND a substantially larger rapid transit system, and yet Vancouver beats it on ridership (Toronto beats it several times over)! The bus numbers tell a similar story, but what’s perhaps more interesting is that Canada’s smaller big cities like Edmonton beat cities like Seattle on bus ridership. That is WILD — remember Seattle has a mostly bus-based system and is celebrated as being one of the leading edge systems in the US these days, and yet a second-tier Canadian city like Edmonton is able to beat it. Even crazier is Brampton — a suburb of Toronto — is nearly at San Francisco-levels of bus ridership.

Now, a lot of this isn’t predictable if you only look at Wikipedia articles and system maps (which felt like a lot of the discourse on say NUMTOT) — Vancouver has a tiny train network, and Brampton has a tiny population — how the hell could they be performing better than such large and transit-friendly American cities? The answer is policy, mode choice and service levels (all of which are not so easy to ascertain, you need to do digging and look at schedules and look at agency websites and listen to board meetings!). Again, these are things that sometimes get attention in the North American transit discourse, but are often ignored and certainly have gotten little attention historically.

The US seems bad at being honest with itself about transit

Of course, I say none of this because I think Canada is just better than the US and that’s that (I assume my Substack audience gets this, but alas), but because I want the US to get better. The issue as I see it is that you cannot improve if you cannot identify why your past attempts at improvement have failed. I feel a close connection to the US like many Canadians and I have lots of family in the country, I want better for them — and for the world, much of which still looks to the US for leadership.

But, these days I feel like I see a flavour of urbanists from America (or at least speaking to Americans) who just go on pretending the countries are the same and sometimes even romanticizing bad elements of the country’s transit — such as rolling stock built to antiquated standards not in line with the rest of the world (one might question why if the rolling stock is so good why so few people want to get on it!).

A topic worth addressing that often also comes up… New York City.

New York City Subway.

New York Interjection

Whenever a conversation like this comes up online where American cities are being critiqued for making poor decisions with their transit systems, I frequently see people bring up New York — maybe X train moves Y people per day! See, we can do good transit!

What’s frustrating about this is that I think New York is successful not because of modern transit doctrine in the US, but despite it. America is basically not building new subway lines anymore even as many New York subway lines outperform entire light rail systems.

At the same time, the state of the subway is poor. People are excited about the R211s, and on the micro scale they are obvious a big improvement, but they aren’t even all fully open gangway — something big Canadian cities all had 10 years ago and Asian cities had over 25 years ago. That’s not even to get into issues like the state of accessibility, signalling, or stations — and there are plenty of other old systems that have done much better and often with less resources. We need to learn from them!

In less words, why hold New York’s Subway up as an example when we aren’t trying to replicate its success and we’re also doing a poor job modernizing it?

There’s also a case to be made that New York has a successful subway because it structurally has to — the density of Manhattan in particular is almost without parallels in the western world, and New York City would simply not function if the subway did not. At a certain city size, you just can’t function at a certain level without mass transit.

And yet, at the end of the day, the numbers still aren’t as good as they could be. The New York Subway is huge, but the intensity of ridership is quite poor when you compare to a system like Hong Kong or Mexico City, and bus ridership is only twice that of Toronto despite New York being much larger and much more congested (and having a geography that structurally supports transit).

Probably the most frustrating thing for me to watch has been the way any kind of “improvement” is cheered even when it is a return to status quo, or even just a service increase relative to a huge service cut.

I already brought up the example of the New York R211 for example. The R211 is a train which has features in line with Japanese trains from over a decade ago and likely costs much more than those trains did - and yet its being treated like it is very innovative.

Another example is the situation with the DC Metro. This transit system was what some might call a “dumpster fire” for years and years, and while the team that is turning it around obviously deserves praise — I would struggle to celebrate a transit system that was falling apart going back to just doing its job.

That’s especially frustrating, because even just talking about the R211 and DC Metro’s comeback are… niche topics in the transit discourse today (so I feel bad faulting people for bringing them up — they are real positive things). Topics that seem to garner much more interest and attention are things like fare-free transit, which at best seems like a neutral policy but in practice is probably a negative policy, particularly in a country with transit systems that are often very low on service.

What to do?

The problem is talking about so many of the issues the US faces requires an interested audience. Many YouTube channels and news outlets will happily trumpet the “number of miles being built” that transit authorities will put out in press releases but never ask if the trains will run frequently or if the stations will get high-rise development… or just parking.

So then is there an easy formula to fix things that the US can learn from Canada? Sometimes I think there might be.

Often it feels like Canada’s algorithm for good transit has just been to build more of what works: Toronto implemented the GO trains, GO trains did well, more GO train lines were built. Vancouver built SkyTrain, SkyTrain did well, more SkyTrain was built. Of course, these processes also happen with micro adjustments along the way.

By comparison, the US so often seems to ignore its successes and just built something else instead. For example, the red and purple lines in LA actually perform well for ridership when you account for the bad service they get — and yet, despite the billions upon billions LA is spending on new rapid transit (one of the largest transit expansion budgets in the world) the “subway” will only grow a little! Another example I think of a lot is Amtrak’s Northeast Regional — this service is Amtrak’s bread and butter and they sell a ton of seats, and yet the new trains Amtrak has purchased for the service are inexplicably not double deckers that could expand capacity — as seen with regional trains in Germany and Sweden. To be clear, there are examples of American cities building stuff that will be successful — mostly in New York — but the cities refusal to learn from around the world, and its own local experts means it can’t get these projects done on human scaled timelines or at reasonable budgets — even for one of the richest cities in the world.

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This is only my first of probably many more long form articles on transit reform in the US, if you enjoy it please consider sharing it!