TRANSIT

Speaking of environmentalism, Canada’s record on one of the most reliable drivers of lowered emissions is also undergoing a bit of a dark age. In Ottawa, a $9-billion LRT system debuted with almost cartoonish levels of glitches, bugs, breakdowns and even overpowering smells in the stations. bombardier was so catastrophically late in delivering new streetcars to Toronto that the contract ended up in court. In edmonton, they installed an entirely new light-rail line that simply didn’t work.

boondoggles aside, relying on transit in a major Canadian city means regular and increasingly frequent encounters with utterly monstrous backups. even Vancouver, which can boast some of Canada’s newest and most glamorous transit lines, is seeing the gradual erosion of existing services, with four-fifths of the city’s bus lines getting measurably slower each year. Falling desperately behind on public transit is something we share with u.s. cities, but it’s wildly out of step with even the most infrastructure-indebted countries in europe and east Asia.