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Originally Posted by Crawford
I'd say the biggest factors are race/demographics, wealth and local control. Those factors best explain the divergence.
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Unfortunately, I think this is big part of this. In the post-WWII era, public transit in the United States became intertwined with race. The book, "The Lost Subways of North America," by Jake Berman, does an excellent job of describing this history. City after city in the United States either closed their rail transit systems or made suboptimal investments because white flight and racist sentiment.
I also don't think Canada had anything like the movement from the industrial north and Northeastern cities that were built around transit to the low-density Sunbelt sprawl in the decades following World War II.