How Canada Is Beating the US in the Public Transportation Race

In late November 2025, the city of Montreal inaugurated the second branch of its brand-new light rail network, the REM, extending from Gare Centrale in downtown Montreal, tunnelling under Mount Royal, all the way to Deux-Montagnes on the North Shore of Montreal. Residents throughout Canada’s second-largest city celebrated the opening, but perhaps the greatest achievement was hiding in the balance sheet. Built at a cost of just $139 million USD per mile, the REM is a stark contrast to public transit projects south of the 49th parallel: an extension of the D line in Los Angeles is estimated to come in at over $1,380 million USD per mile; a BART extension in Santa Clara county in the San Francisco Bay Area is slated for over $2,030 million USD; and perhaps most notoriously, the Second Avenue subway extension in New York City is now projected to reach a cost of $4,300 million USD per mile. 

Not only is the REM significantly cheaper than comparable American projects, but it has also delivered results. With only two out of four branches completed, the new line already sees upwards of 24,000 daily passengers during an average week, rising to as many as 36,000 on weekdays—adding to Montreal’s already strong public transit ridership of over 1.1 million passengers per day. In comparison, Chicago, with almost 1 million more residents within its city limits, records 200,000 fewer daily passengers across its bus network and its eight heavy rail lines, collectively known as the “L”.

On the whole, public transit in Canada is built more cheaply and operates more efficiently than in the United States. This raises an important question: what can American cities learn from how Canada builds public transportation?

The answer begins not with megaprojects or billion-dollar tunnels, but with a more basic failure—one that plays out every single day in cities like Chicago. Nina Limbeck, a commuter who lives in Avondale, Chicago, describes her daily struggles with commuting to her job via public transport: “I drive 25 minutes to Elmwood Park every day, which is a suburb on the border of the city. I could take the bus down Addison [Street], but the bus stops at the border of the city, so I would have to walk, and it’d be a pretty long walk, like 45 minutes. I could also take the train down to the Loop, and get on the Metra, which is the train that goes out into the suburbs, which would take me over an hour.”

Nina’s commute illustrates one of the core issues plaguing many cities in the United States. Most US transit systems were designed with one specific goal in mind: funnelling commuters from the suburbs into downtown business districts, even though, in practice, the most common form of commute in North America has become suburb-to-suburb. 

This gap is visible in the frequency and reach of bus networks. The following graphic compares high-frequency bus route networks provided by the Chicago Transit Authority in Chicago, Illinois, and the Toronto Transit Commission in Toronto, Ontario. Two cities that are quite similar in their metro area populations and geographic location.

When looking at high-frequency bus routes—defined as a bus route serviced with sub-30-minute headways—the contrast can be seen as follows:

According to Jonathan English, a fellow at the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University, if American planners are able to invest in the fundamentals (i.e., more vehicles and rolling stock, and hiring extra drivers to increase frequencies), then the demand for transit will soon follow. He comments: “It is possible, that if we invest in basic operations, and improve at local service, that the riders will come. And that’s something that we can do in weeks.”

But frequency alone doesn’t explain why Canada builds infrastructure so much more cheaply. For that, the REM offers another lesson: political will.

One reason why the REM was completed in a timely fashion and relatively within budget is the strong backing the project received from both the provincial government of Quebec and the municipal government of Montreal. By comparison, many public transport projects conceived in the United States go through long phases of political turmoil and remain in limbo for years before they are ultimately approved for construction and funding, if ever. As a result, costs accumulate over time, and eventually, most projects go over budget and end up with ridiculously long delays compared to their initially promised opening date. 

Nowhere is the alternative model clearer than in the small metropolitan area of Kitchener-Waterloo, located northwest of Toronto. Kitchener-Waterloo has a combined metro area population of just under 700,000, making it a mid-sized city on the continent, similar to Madison, Wisconsin, Des Moines, Iowa, or Akron, Ohio. However, what sets this Canadian city apart from these three American cities is that it is served by a respectable bus network, albeit small, and a full-fledged LRT, dubbed the Ion, that records around 11,000 passengers daily. What is even more impressive is the cost at which the Ion was built: $71 million USD per mile, far lower than for other at-grade light rail networks. For comparison, the second phase of Line E in Los Angeles cost $227 million per mile. 

But perhaps even more impressive than the low cost is the level of cooperation among urban planners, politicians, and government agencies in Kitchener-Waterloo to deliver this plan on budget and on time. Jedwin Mok, a researcher of public transit at the University of Toronto, comments on the development of Ion and how collaboration between different departments allowed the line to be built with minimal delay and overspending: “[GRT] had the political backing to get what they wanted […] because they had authority over the roads, the wastewater, the sewers, and the utilities. When they delivered the project, they could reduce the amount of delays, whereas in other projects, we have to juggle all these other third parties, and oftentimes that […] adds time and cost to the delivery.”

It is striking how much a transit agency and a municipal government can accomplish when they work together toward a common goal—and how rarely that happens in the United States. The reason, ultimately, is that urban planning is intrinsically a political issue, as most decisions are subject to approval by municipal or provincial governments. Canada is far from a perfect model: its own cities still grapple with underfunded networks, aging infrastructure, and transit deserts in lower-income neighbourhoods. But the disparity between Canadian and American transit is not an accident of geography or engineering: it is the predictable result of differences in political priorities. For people who genuinely care about the future of public transit in their city, the most important thing they can do is make those priorities known—and hold the people they elect accountable for them.

Edited by Idan Miller

N.B.: The original article erroneously labelled the CTA sub-10-minute frequency bus network as the sub-30-minute frequency bus network in the second graphic. The graphic has been updated to feature a map presented in CTA’s 2023 Bus Vision Study of the 2019 CTA frequent bus network with sub-30-minute headways.

Featured Image: Photo of a Montreal REM Train by Robert Macleod is licensed under the Unsplash License.