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how similar are other North American countries to USA??
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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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Am Canadian. From what I gather they're pretty similar. We have the same scenario of lots of land, cheap energy, (relatively) young cities that could change to be car dependant as they grew. So lots of big houses, big stores, etc.
The differences: I don't think our inner cities hollowed out with white flight, don't have as much segregation (it's actually quite the melting pot), while we have plenty of car dependency I don't think it's quite as bad as the US.
We have more progressive things like universal healthcare, decent public education. The US really seems intent on not having those because, as I see it, they don't want black people to have it.
Feel free to ask anything.
The American k-12 education system is varied in quality based on the municipality.
Which is ironically part of the problem. Rich parts want to keep their tax money for their education. Poor parts get nothing.
Where I am all the schools are funded by the province and funded the same.
woa Mexico has those things too of course!! It's interesting, I guess the country in the middle (USA) is really different, and all of those things must be universal, otherwise most people will have their lives shorten drastically which is very bad!!
I would say our car dependency is the same or worse compared to America. In America they have the population to support small towns that are dense and walkable. These are rare enough that every single one of them is a tourist destination… but we don’t even have one. All the Canadian small towns have a highway, a Walmart, a Boston pizza, and maybe a strip mall.
Toronto, canadas biggest city, is fully dependent on the car. There are multiple highways running through it, cutting neighborhoods off and decreasing walkability. The transit system is somehow even less developed than the already meagre American alternatives, with two short subway lines servicing a city of like 3 mill.
Look at pictures of the freeways of most US cities, it's far, far beyond what we have.
With the exception of certain cities like NYC, from what I hear US transit barely exists or exists in a token form that's not really usable. We can complain ours isn't good enough but it's certainly there. It's hard to tell because the complaining sounds the same, but I've come to conclude the US transit is far worse.
Eh I don’t know. I’m from Canada and I live in the USA right now. Most places in Canada that I’ve experienced are completely car dependent, and there’s only a few cities with big transit systems? Where I live now has incredible transit compared to where I was in Canada and people here complain far more about transit than they did in Canada (probably in part because people actually use it). The cities that I’ve lived in definitely give a bit of a biased perspective, though.
It’s hard to say which is really more car dependent. There are more larger cities in the US and more with decent transit infrastructure compared to Canada, but maybe per capita or per city Canada would win because there’s a lot of Midwest and the US has a higher population? If I was picking a place to live and transit was the only consideration, though, I would probably pick the USA over Canada because there’s more cities to choose from and more rail.
You compare cities of the same size. You don't compare Toronto to NYC.
I mean it really depends on what you're measuring to compare car dependence. Is it number of people who have to drive every day? Number of cities where most of the population has to drive every day? Are you comparing transit infrastructure on equivalently sized cities (and then is the size by population, or do you compare cities of the same density...). If you're looking at how many people across the country need a car, NYC is very relevant. Realistically this is something that mostly makes sense to compare by city rather than by country (obviously the country has influence over transit, but that's not really the point).