Commuters Ditched Public Transit for Work From Home. Now There’s a Crisis.

[ball_square]

The difference seems to only grow with time. More transit up over there in the north. Less and less here for more and more misery. It only gets more clear with time that all, all of the hope will only be on one side and none at all on the other.

Such a good post followed up with such doomey nonsense. If Harris had won, we very well may have seen an influx of federal transit funding rather than a reduction. And if Canada ever gets a hard-right PM, they go be going in the same direction we are now. Nothing bad is necessarily permanent and nothing good can be taken for granted.

 

[BACsop]

Such a good post followed up with such doomey nonsense. If Harris had won, we very well may have seen an influx of federal transit funding rather than a reduction. And if Canada ever gets a hard-right PM, they go be going in the same direction we are now. Nothing bad is necessarily permanent and nothing good can be taken for granted.

The Conservatives in Canada are often supportive of mass transit, or at the very least there's no knee-jerk anti-urban bias against it. Doug Ford is famously pro-subway and even Pierre Poilievre, before his disastrous election defeat this spring, had campaigned on a platform of rewarding cities with increased transit funds if they met housing production targets. Transit is not politicized in Canada anywhere near the level seen in the US. And Canadian transit systems significantly outperform their American counterparts on a ridership basis, a gap which was notable before COVID and which has grown even greater post-COVID.

That's not to say Canada could never get a full blown anti-transit administration like we have now in the US. Or to discount your point that a Harris administration could have showered US transit agencies with funding. But transit in Canada is viewed more as a public good for the benefit of all, and not a culture war issue like it is here. Even in oil rich and extremely conservative Alberta, both principal cities (Edmonton and Calgary) are expanding their LRT networks and have higher ridership per mile than any US light rail system (and it's not particularly close)!

All that said, by international developed world standards, Canada is certainly behind the curve (especially in the intercity and regional rail context). But as far as urban mass transit goes, Canada wipes the floor with us.