Toronto != Canada
Can we really? All the reporting on climate change definitely has me thinking otherwise. There are options more respectful to our planet than digging tunnels like for example planting trees to help mediate temperatures.
Except for sub-zero temperatures. And regular 100+ degree temperatures. And tornadoes. And derechos. And hurricanes. And a bunch of other weather phenomena that doesn't happen regularly in Europe.
All weather-related excuses why those cities cannot be made less car-dependent are, to put simply, fucking bullshit excuses and just that.
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand how weather, people, or cities work.
There are dozens and dozens of cities, big medium and even small, all over Europe, which have some combination of sub-zero temperatures, regular 100+ degree temperatures, lots of snow, lots of rain, lots of hills, and every other imaginable geography-related carbrains excuse in existence in North America. They bike, walk and take transit all the same. All bullshit excuses, all demonstrably so. The reason North America is car dependent is by conscious choice and by design, and absolutely nothing else whatsoever.
Once again, this is false.
Trains don't go everywhere because America is large. Geographically, the "center" of America is larger than the entirety of continental Europe. You can fit the rich part of Europe in the American desert and still have room to spare. A U.S. train network as dense as what Europe has would cost hundreds of billions.
Trains of course used to go everywhere in North America, and were economically viable just fine, until cars were artificially made more economically viable.
This was never true. Trains have always been primarily about cargo in the U.S.
Cars were pushed because for several decades, cars were the cheapest and best option for a country as geographically large as the U.S.
Name even one. You won't be able to, because unless the Atlantic currents change, the European climate simply doesn't have the same extremes as the U.S. does. To put it bluntly: if any European city had extremes from sub-zero to plus-100 on a regular basis, it would be global news. OTOH, Most of the U.S. Northeast and Midwest experiences this every year.
You're also overstating the degree to which people walk in Europe, by a lot. Yes, people walk and take public transit. But that's because they can't afford a car. And their economic counterparts in the U.S. similarly bike, walk, or take public transit.
What possible difference does it make that Toronto might have both weather extremes if there are so many examples of better-designed and better-run cities successfully dealing with any of them? Just intellectually lazy excuses.
>Yes, people walk and take public transit. But that's because they can't afford a car.
No, they very often do it by choice. You'd see people making that choice in the US too, but they can't. Their choice is car or stay the fuck home. Millions of Americans also can't afford a car, but they buy one anyway because they can't get to work in any other way. They are forced to pay through the nose (relative to their income) for one, whereas in Europe they'd be far more likely to have a viable public transit option. By viable I mean frequent, convenient and comfortable. There are probably a dozen such systems in North America, if not fewer, and even those systems don't reach most of the population of their city. NY, Montreal and Toronto are the partial exceptions, and Toronto only because of the best bus system in North America.
>And their economic counterparts in the U.S. similarly bike, walk, or take public transit.
You'd need a moderate to severe death wish to routinely walk or bike outside your little bubble of a subdivision in the majority of North American suburbs. Much worse in the US, but true of Canada as well. Downtowns are every bit as bad. As soon as you hit a stroad [0], you start re-evaluating your life choices.
Madrid's "heat waves" don't compare to anything in the American South or Southwest. It gets warmer in San Jose than it does in Madrid. The Midwest gets colder than Oulu; you have to go to the northern remote reaches of Europe to get comparable temperatures or snow.
So basically, what it boils down to is that you're comparing cities with temperate weather to cities with extreme weather and not understanding that weather makes a huge difference.
NY, Montreal and Toronto are the partial exceptions, and Toronto only because of the best bus system in North America.
This is false, and betrays a fundamentally poor knowledge of America's public transportation systems. LA, SF Bay Area, Chicago, and DC also have good bus systems; LA's bus system has the most geographic coverage of any metropolitan bus network in the world.
You'd need a moderate to severe death wish to routinely walk or bike outside your little bubble of a subdivision in the majority of North American suburbs
This is false. You appear to have formed your understanding of American geography based on movies and television. Millions of people routinely walk and bike in North America. Most of us don't live in suburbs.
The ones in Montreal (and Kobe, Toronto, etc) don't seem to replace surface streets or transit; they complement it. The Réso in Montreal overlaps with some of the most walkable parts of the city and a half-dozen metro stops, plus train stations and bus depots.
I also don't think many people "thru-hike" it either. A lot of it is short trips (e.g., grabbing lunch) that would be doable, but a bit more annoying, if you had to re-dress for the weather on each end.