David David Godin, with some insightful observations:
I’m racing across Germany by bullet train en route to Paris and I’m in a contemplative mood. As I look out the window at a verdant countryside dotted with windmills I’m struck mute at the realisation of how incredible it is that after all the events of the twentieth century Europe emerged intact and at peace.
This continent has been rocked by war and strife almost without interruption for two and a half millennia and now I can take a train in an afternoon between the capitals of old enemies without thinking about anything beyond my arrival time and what I will eat en route.
Can you imagine the utter disbelief you would elicit if you tried to describe today’s Europe to someone twenty five years ago? Fifty? A century? A millennium?
We live in astonishing times.
The mere fact that I have spent my youth so far in school, work, leisure and peaceful public service instead of in a uniform represents a complete departure from the inertia of history. Add to that the fact that my life has never been touched by war, hunger, forced relocation, or the crippling fear of a police state and you have a life that would have been unimaginable to most people anywhere until a staggeringly recent date. We’ve had no food shortages, ration books, bomb shelters, or mass unemployment in Canada in my lifetime. I, and most people my age, comprehend but don’t understand these things, really.
The people I’ve met in my travels have been wonderful and I’m sure it never once occurred to us as we drank, explored, and talked together that if we had been born a couple generations earlier some of us may very well have fought each other in war or two.
Travelling through so many cities has been a wonderful experience and I’ve learned so much. The trains and metros I have encountered are the outcome of a concerted and ongoing effort to increase public mobility as a public good. This dramatically increases the accessibility of each city and country and makes them welcoming places that one is encouraged to explore. It also expresses a form of civic confidence that is tangible. People take pride in their high speed rail and metro systems and you can detect this when one asks for directions to the nearest station or inquires when the last train runs. For Paris there is always a station within a five to ten minute walk and in Berlin the trains never stop running. Countries compete for the fastest bullet train and while France currently holds this title you can be sure German engineers aren’t prepared to concede just yet. It reminds me of the competition among nations for the fastest trans-Atlantic crossing.
We’re working on this side of things in Vancouver once we extend SkyTrain under Broadway to UBC we will start getting towards a useful network that actually takes you where you want to go within the city, not just to and from the suburbs. I have to add that SkyTrain really does stack up quite favourably in terms of level of service with the systems I’ve used. It is cleaner by far than every metro but Berlin’s, and it is more frequent than all but the Paris Metro. Of course we fall flat on our face when it comes to being a comprehensive system that becomes the primary mode of travel within a city. I do cut us some slack in that we’ve only been in the metro game for 23 years while Berlin and Paris have been in it for 100+ years and are national capitals.
Vancouver also falls flat on its face when it comes to bicycle infrastructure. It isn’t rocket science and of everything I’ve seen our Carrall Street Greenway is far and away the most expensive-looking piece of bicycle inf. Why don’t we paint great blue or red lanes through our intersections? Why don’t we take the half-lane of road space that lies between parked cars and the adjacent travel lane and instead move this to beside the sidewalk and use that as a bicycle lane? Lay down the low cement barriers used in parking lots and paint the new lane blue or green. Also, why don’t we take one parallel parking space per block, put up a concrete barrier at each end and put in a bike rack? These are basic, basic steps that are effectively zero cost and every city and even the towns I see from the train do this.
It’s like plumbing and electricity, roads and sidewalks, all basic building blocks of cities.
Lastly, one huge thing we should congratulate ourselves for is how universally accessible Vancouver is. People in wheelchairs and walkers have largely been absent from the cities I’ve seen. Not only are most metro systems not universally accessible but the basic street design of curbs in most cities lack curb cuts and the few I saw are much steeper and shallower than at home. Part of this is the advantage of being a young city with assumptions like universal accessibility being deeply institutionalised, but it also possibly reflects different cultural expectations of the independence, civic participation, and maybe even the value of citizens without the same mobility as the super majority. As the boomers age and the “grey tsunami” becomes a reality I suspect universal accessibility will become a competitive advantage for cities that are well prepared.
I’m on a TGV and Paris lies an hour ahead of me. We’re going very quick now. I’m in the first car after the lead locomotive and on the straight flat sections you can feel the engineer open the throttles and the entire cabin rumbles as the locomotives at each end of the train pull and push us even faster. It’s very similar to the feel of when a BC Ferry throws the engines into reverse as it gets ready to dock and you can feel those huge engines through the hull. Very similar except, of course, for the small detail that I’m on a train and it is going at more than 320 kph!
That’s all for now.
David
not much to say but cool stuff. Keep us posted on what you see and find over there.
I loved Kunstler’s point about how it was European cities that underwent two world wars, but it was American cities that have emerged from the twentieth century looking like bombed-out ruins!