I agree with you wholeheartedly that car centric urban design is a bad thing. Truly, I do. But in very rural places in North America, you either need a car or a horse and buggy, or something, and the car seems like an obvious upgrade. Just because they can do public transit in rural areas in Europe does not mean we can do it here. Because the size comparisons aren't even close. European countries with good rural transportation are dealing with significantly less landmass than North American rural communities are.

To put things in perspective, Denmark is 42,947km^2^, and Canada is 9,984,670 km^2^. That means that you could fit almost 232 and a half Denmarks in Canada. Despite this about half of the population of Canada in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, which is only 1,150 km-long, and about 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border. That means that the vast majority of Canada is totally rural, and there are often vast distances between towns and First Nations. It is simply not economically feasible to build rail lines to connect all these places, let along sending out regular train services to these places.

To really hammer the point home, consider Nunavut, a territory in Canada. It is 2,093,190 km^2^. For perspective, Ukraine (the second-largest country in Europe after Russia) is 603,549km^2^. That means you could almost put three and a half Ukraine's in Nunavut (and again, Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe!). And Nunavut is extremely rural, with a population of 36,858 (and Ukraine has 32283000 people, meaning that Nunavut has 875.87 times fewer people than Ukraine). The largest population centre in Nunavut is Iqaluit, which has only 7,429 people.

So putting aside, for a second, the extreme logistical challenges with creating railways in Nunavut (due to terrain, ice, etc), how can we possibly build public transit to connect the entire territory? When we are dealing with places this vast, and this rural, we simply not economically feasible to build rural public transit. Even reality wealthy countries like Canada cannot afford to fund megaprojects like that. And again, this is just Nunavut, 1 of 13 provinces / territories. When you look at the entirety of Canada, it is simply not realistic to have rural public transit servicing the entire country. I'm sure it's possible in small countries like Denmark, but not here.

But that doesn't change the fact that, within cities at least, we should of course do our best to get rid of car centric design.