If I wasn’t looking for a lay-out of the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, I would not have come across this piece in the inflight magazine, “The American Way:”
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One doesn’t expect, nor get, discouraging words (“Don’t come to this place that we fly you to; it’s a hole.”) But a fluff piece can be nonetheless engaging when it gives insights into what an outsider, particularly an urbanist from Dallas, might think is.
Some quotes:
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For Vancouver is a city that has (largely) solved one of the great problems of Sunbelt cities such as Dallas, my hometown. By not allowing highways into its urban core, it has neither caused blight nor choked development the way elevated highways of the 1960s did in so many American cities. (Which is why cities all across America, from San Francisco to St. Louis to Syracuse, New York, have taken or are taking out urban-core freeways and replacing them with pedestrian-friendly boulevards.) Because Vancouver began this process decades ago. Because Vancouver is now a place that our greatest American cities want to emulate.
… it’s the starting point for people who want to know how to improve their own city. Being from Dallas and being part of a group trying to take down an elevated highway in our city (Coalition for a New Dallas), I definitely wanted to see the City of Glass for myself. And my girlfriend, Megan, wanted a sweet vacation. Win-win. …
In a city like Dallas — 105 degrees when I left, as opposed to mid-70s when I arrived in Vancouver — you rarely walk places. The city is not conducive to it, either by design or because of the heat. I sometimes walk one mile to work and people look at me like I’m a unicorn. Here, though, as in highly walkable cities like New York or San Francisco, wide sidewalks were packed with pedestrians. In East Coast cities, this is often as much a function of density as anything else: nearly 67,000 people per square mile in Manhattan, for example. And while the city of Vancouver is certainly dense (about 13,000 per square mile, the most densely populated city in Canada, and fourth-most of major cities in North America), it’s also a city well integrated with its environment and well thought-out by city planners.
Walking the streets, one intuitively feels this symbiosis between pedestrians and the city. Streets are narrow and traffic moves slowly, so you never feel unsafe walking through it. You never come to a sudden end to a sidewalk and are forced into the road or into parking lots like you often are in Dallas. (In fact, you almost never see parking lots, the scourge of modern city design, in Vancouver.)
[Then stuff about shopping and eating.]
I lived in Atlanta for a year without a car, just riding my bike and taking public transportation where I needed to go, proving you can do so in even the most car-centric of American cities. But Vancouver showed me how a city can not only tolerate but encourage bike use. Bike lanes are wide and abundant. Bike shops are all over the city and do a brisk business. In fact, the city itself is currently proposing a $150 million investment in its (already top-notch) transportation system, part of which is upgrading its (already fantastic) cycling infrastructure.
This goes with what Dallas’ premier expert on walkable and bikeable cities, Patrick Kennedy, says makes Vancouver so enviable. “Cities can and should be amenable, accessible and empowering to all ages and income levels,” says Kennedy, a partner in the Dallas-based urban-design firm Space Between Design Studio. “Vancouver has shown the rest of North America what a 21st-century city looks like. It has shown that city building is about meeting the needs of residents and that a functional, beautiful city is a service in itself.”
[More stuff about buying stuff.]
“Any city that just attempts to take something from Vancouver and apply it without calibrating for context and to the particular problem a city faces is setting itself up for failure,” says urban expert Kennedy. “In that way, the best lesson from Vancouverism is about the problem-solving process. High-density, high-value cities like New York and San Francisco, or emerging cities like Austin, are learning it, while low-density, car-dependent cities like Dallas are learning that travel behaviors can change if you give people legitimate, safe, reliable alternatives to the car.” …
I waved for the check. We were taking much back from the City of Glass to our Sunbelt city — a better understanding of what makes Vancouver worth emulating, a feeling for the possibilities of a modern downtown that works in concert with its inhabitants. We didn’t need to take back everything we saw. The aforementioned knowledge and that sweet coat I bought were plenty.
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Full story here.
