Imagine how this would disempower landlords if you could commute to either of those cities from anywhere between them.
Car dependency is about power, it’s about keeping workers vulnerable and reliant on constant employment to participate in society. The one thing the US and Canada has over other imperial powers is the obscene amount of space each state has at its disposal within the metropole with which to construct what really is an exceptional form of oppression. It’s important to recognize that when you’re talking about ending car dependency, this is an existential threat to either power, and they will treat it in kind.
There is convenience in the ineptitude of neoliberal politics in state-planning and infrastructure, which most people attribute as the cause of this development, but it’s crucial to remember that suburban sprawl and car dependency were state projects by the US and Canada in very much they same way neoliberal privatization is.
Most of the EU’s weight comes from its role in legitimizing/supporting US imperialism in exchange for having their collective colonial holdings maintained. I don’t think it’s anything new for Europeans to externalize their anxieties in a way that necessitates their power and moral righteousness to exploit the global south as a form of “protection.”
Now that their shared system is bleeding (never really recovered from the '08 crisis), their enforcer squeezed, and now they’re contemplating the cost/benefit of allying with another one. They would seriously sooner stay with the US or gear up their own violent oppression before they conceded the right to “protect” themselves through colonialism, and that means maintaining the notion that white capitalists are the only trustworthy allies.