Reece Martin

I spend a lot of time talking about how to expand public transit in North America so that we might someday have transit and passenger railways that can approach the same magnitude of extensiveness of those in Europe and Asia. However, it is worth reflecting on the fact that we are less far behind in sheer scope than people often realize.

North America is naturally going to have less intercity rail than Europe or Asia owing to the low population densities we see. Sure, there’s no reason the Northeast Corridor, or California, or Quebec City-Windsor should not have dramatically better rail (I would note, dramatically better rail is some way shape or form is happening in all of these places), but frequent or high-speed rail would not exist from Vancouver to Calgary, or from Salt Lake City to San Francisco if they were in Europe or Asia! There would probably be a daily, or maybe twice daily train. The reality of this continent is that while we do have big cities and city clusters — they are often legitimately very far apart.

Now yes, it is possible that this train would be electric, and yes, neither of the city pairs I just mentioned are close to living up to the standard of rail service you might see in other parts of the world, but the gap is smaller than people appreciate.

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I think too often in North America we think that are problem is not having enough transit, and to be clear — that is part of the problem without a doubt. But cities like Toronto, Seattle, and New York have plenty of transit and still don’t stand up that well to those overseas, and that’s because we have a quality issue that is almost as big as our quantity issue. Even transit agencies like the TTC that are objectively good at running and maintaining transit service by North American standards seem to be totally unaware of things like global wayfinding best practices or even modern business best practices. Transit agencies across the continent build projects for far more than international (and domestic) comparators and seem to spend little time reflecting on this.

There str a lot of places where we can and should spend energy on expanding our transit systems, but it makes me very sad when I see crisis going from city to city — Chicago, Toronto, Washington DC, and Boston have all seen major regressions in service levels and quality on their existing metro systems: systems that are actually pretty large! The entire culture of the continent’s transit industry needs to shift to put greater focus on actually showing up and providing frequent, reliable, everyday service. While we do need to level up and expand at the same time — adding new lines, re-signalling, and improving safety (screen doors or gates) and accessibility (elevators and escalators) on old lines — we also clearly need to put more energy on not regressing.

And to be clear, it’s not all regression. I love when I see a transit system in North America implement nice digital wayfinding, as an example. But if we want great transit, we shouldn’t settle for something less than what would be best-in-class in Europe. One of the only advantages in being so slow to technical innovations and transit system improvements should be that we can just copy the best, and because we are too unfamiliar of what the best is and what it looks like we don’t. That needs to change.