Frank Ducote must have noticed that several cities were mentioned in posts yesterday – notably Vancouver and Vienna, two of the cities declared as ‘best place to live,’ as well as Houston.
Coincidentally: “Just compare their footprints and therefore their relative densities and proximity to destinations without needing a car. (Credit: Jack Diamond, undated but some years old).”
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Uhhh, that Vancouver map is wrong on several fronts.
Obviously, it is NOT the CITY of Vancouver – because it includes the UEL, West Vancouver, and both City and Districts of North Vancouver.
Its eastern border is obviously not Boundary Road, so it looks like it includes Burnaby and New Westminster, too.
If it’s not the City of Vancouver, is it Metro Vancouver? Nope.
Excluded are municipalities south of the Fraser (Richmond, Delta, Surrey, White Rock, the Langleys) and Port Moody, Coquitlam, Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge.
Now in exactly what area does that 2,100,000 population reside? I’ll bet it includes Surrey and the rest of south of Fraser the area for which is not shown on that map.
Guest – chill a bit. It is the Metro region, not the city, as the 2.1 million population indicates.
A bit more refinement, Frank. The Metro graphic appears to exclude the humongous watersheds and ALR, otherwise Surrey and Langley would end at the straight line of the US border. This is the Urban Containment Boundary that encompasses a little more than 800 km2 out of the region’s ~2,800 km2, plus the major parks, so perhaps a total of 900 km2.
Now what about Vienna? Wikipedia lists the area as 415 km2 (for the city not the metro area), as compared to 115 km2 for Vancouver or as you said maybe 900 km2 for the metro area with exclusions. So I think that would look much bigger… I thought maybe that is just showing some small central area of Vienna that is very densely populated, but Wikipedia says the population of the 415km2 city is 1.8 million, and just looking at a map of the area you can see that a lot of it has a relatively even population density.
I could be missing something but it just seems off to me.
Simple; Viena doesn’t have a world-class supply of lawns like Vancouver.
Got stretched vertically. Apologies.
Vienna also existed, more or less, in its current fairly dense form of 5-6 story wall-to-wall apartment building structures, before the elevator and the car was invented. Ditto with Paris, London, Berlin and many other, smaller European centers. As such, they are are more pedestrian friendly today as only the rich could afford a horse or carriage in the early 1800’s. Most North American cities, except perhaps New York, grew only substantially in the 20th century with the car, and therefore will take while to be re-built for pedestrians and pedestrian friendly transit, without the car in mind.
Thomas, that’s a useful observation. So in engineering those older cities to be less car-oriented, they are in effect returning to what might be termed their natural state; the type of transportation they evolved around – foot, water, and later rail.
In re-engineering North American cities, one is going against the natural state of the city. But the natural state of these cities is not, in fact, car-driven (little pun there). The recent article in The Sun about the old interurban made reminded us that this city, like most in NA, did not evolve around cars, or not only cars, but rather rail. Rail and horses, to be precise.
I’ve never seen a discussion of the impact of horse travel on original urban design, and I wonder if it wasn’t a more prominent factor in North America than in Europe (while not at all in Asia?). Keep in mind the bicycle was only invented in the late 1800s and only became popular around 1920. They weren’t practical for travel due to the state of the roads – ironically, the feasibility of serious travel by bicycle has evolved cheek-by-jowl with the feasibility of car travel and the evolution of paving – if you don’t believe me, try riding the Adanac bike route, 1st block west of Nanaimo. There’s another bone-shaker on the 37th route on the west side near Arbutus, if I recall correctly. Cobbles, bicycles? The history of the Tour de France shows how hard that was if you can’t get to Frances St. near Clark any time soon.
There is so much more nuance to the evolution of transportation of both goods and people than the car vs. bicycle war evinces. Understanding the evolution of various cities leads to a better understanding of best planning practices for each of them than does agenda-driven advocacy or brinkmanship.
Not quite. When London installed its first underground, in 1863 (yes, 150+ years ago !) Vancouver was a few wooden huts .. and even in the early 1900’s was maybe a few thousand people. Hardly a city even, really a port for a new rail link. The massive growth, to today of over 2M people, was WITH THE CAR, and yes, a rail link to another port further south (now Steveston).
I am not suggesting it is better than Vienna, or Houston, just different. I find the lack of wide sidewalks downtown or lack of pedestrian zones appalling. Far too car oriented. Far too little rapid transit, say to UBC or N-Van, or W-Van, or E-Van. Far too car and bus based transit. Unfortunately, the proposed transit plan does not change much of that as cars are not tolled, parking fees not raised, nor any viable RAPID transit alternatives offered for most of the city. Car users do not use the bus, unless they are poor, they live close to SkyTrain/Canada-Line or car use is very expensive, which it is not today NOR IN THE PLAN.
Only when car use is more expensive, far more expensive, and far slower than transit will people switch to transit. When is that ? 2050 ?
A “yes” win means continued unabashed public sector spending, and no decongestion on roads nor any meaningful rapid transit.
A “no” win means reflection, time to pause to develop a new, better plan, and perhaps force one onto citizens once the province and MetroVan find common ground on funding. The province funds roads, tunnels and bridges, but not subway tunnels ? That is rather weird.
I find not enough reasons to vote “yes” for this non-decongesting more-wobbly-buses high-wage-transit-worker band aid plan!
Thanks for the additional info. I guess to a large extent carriage traffic paved the way (punning again…) fairly seamlessly for cars. As for how to vote, when the whole funding and decision-making model verges on the insane, it seems fairly obvious that the last thing one wants to do is throw more money at it.
Karen, our “younger” cities were in fact re-engineered for the car after the Interurban/CPR/horse & buggy, and therein went against their natural state post-logging.
The tight gridiron as the generic pattern of North American central cities began to disappear from planning culture around WWI. As a student of cities, I am unable to find a larger N.A. city (not a New Urbanist suburban “town”) with a gridiron pattern that was conceived and built later that that time. Downtown Las Vegas likely being the last past the post.The superblock – thanks a lot, Corbu! – and other so-called Modernist patterns took over around the 1920s as outward, suburban Olmstedian “sprawl” happened, thanks in large part to both long-haul rail networks like the Interurban (not street cars) which created nodal settlements and then eventually the car, which filled in the spaces between the nodes. .
(If anybody has facts contrary to this observation I’d love to hear about it.)
BTW, perhaps the author of the figure ground plans only showed the part of Vienna inside the Ringstrasse (c. 1870s), judging by the shape and small size. Just a guess.