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Originally Posted by thebasketballgeek
Not sure about that tbh. If you look at other cities in France that are similar population Bordeaux and Montpellier both have similar population as Rennes but went the tramway route and now each have 4 tram lines with 135 stations in Bordeaux and 80 in Montpellier. That’s not including the TER regionals for the regions of Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie. Did I mention that all of the cities (including Rennes) are connected to the TGV high speed rail network as well?
Of course ridership numbers are quite a bit higher then their respective Canadian cities, and the only reason they are not blowing them out of the water as expected is because these cities are also much more walkable and bikeable then the majority of mid sized Canadian cities so they aren’t forced to take transit trips to grocery schools or primary school.
That’s just one country in Europe. I heard Germany has even better transit then France for mid-sized cities, and Utrecht in the Netherlands has BRT, light rail, and is part of the Randstad regional rail with decent headways. Then there’s countries like Switzerland which are operating on a completely different level with trains.
Let’s not get it twisted, besides maybe the UK (which makes up for its midsized cities having relatively poor transit by having London) Canada is far behind Europe in rail infrastructure.
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I don't care about rail infrastructure. I'm just talking about ridership. The US cities also have more rail than Canadian cities, but ridership of US cities is 1/10 of Canadian cities. Dallas has the largest modern light rail network in North America, but their system carries as much people as Winnipeg's (approximately 70 million boardings annually in 2019). The only US systems that can match Winnipeg are New York City, San Francisco, and Washington. Winnipeg has higher transit ridership per capita than Chicago with its massive "L" and Metra systems.
There is just no "North American context" when it comes to transit. Canada and US are like two different continents. Canada is much closer to Europe than it is the US. If you compare Canada to UK, the ridership numbers are almost identical. The main difference between Canada and Europe is the rate of cycling and walking.