A few days ago comrade /u/InevitableSwing posted an astounding graph of automobile deaths per capita in different countries.
Obviously America was number one by far 
but what was amazing to me was that Canada's rate is nearly three times lower.
The countries are not that different in many ways 
.
Certainly things like aggressive driving and speed limits of course play a role, but I think the key is probably something a lot more simple: public fucking transit usage.
Example A:
USA
- Own car/drive: 85%
- Public transit: 12%
- Bike: 11%
Example B:
Canada
- Own car/drive: 67%
- Public transit: 23%
- Bike: 11%
So overall 18% fewer Canadians drive, and nearly twice as many take pubic transit.
A lot of our population is centred around the major cities that have decent public transit, and even some of the medium sized cities have decent bus systems too.
- Toronto
- Montreal
- Vancouver
I completely agree with you, and on a related note the almost uniformly higher rates of transit usage in Canada compared to the US (with the exception of the massive anomaly that is NYC) is an interesting source for discussion, and one which cannot be explained by disparities in urban transit infrastructure alone.
That almost all Canadian cities have a rapid transit system of some kind certainly helps their numbers, but even cities in the US with considerably better systems, by most metrics, tend to underperform their Canadian peers. For instance, in 2016 the Canadian capital of Ottawa (a massive city filled with suburbs and rural towns, which then had no rail system whatsoever, and whose slow, unreliable, and infrequent buses are a constant source of complaint) had a higher transit modal share than Washington DC or Chicago, both mostly dense urban cores with extensive heavy rail metros.
I was about to type up an entire essay on the topic, but to be brief I see the cause of Canada's relatively more transit oriented populace to come down to the fact that White flight/suburbanization didn't happen to quite the same extent there (the reasons for which you could write a book on). Something which ensured that downtowns remained hubs of jobs and people, rather than wastelands of parking lots. Simultaneously, because urban centres weren't imagined as places of a terrifying racialized other, to quite the same extent as in the US, transit was not demonized as much and middle-class Canadians were consequently more willing to allow themselves (and their children) to use it.
I mean, did Canada have a significant ethnic minority that people were afraid of the same extend that white america feared black/brown america? A lot harder to do white flight if the people who remain in the cities are also white. The only real ethnic conflict in Canada in the immediate post war period was between the French Canadians and the majority Anglo Canadians, and even the palest englishman is not really all that afraid of a french guy.
Obviously not correcting you, just wondering if my explanation makes sense, since Canadian history isn't really a thing that people can passively pick up for the most part.