Incredible map, I've never seen this before and I grew up here.
Zoning decides so much of the vibe of a city/neighbourhood. Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
Having lived in 6 other cities, other things Vancouver does well that aren't obvious on this map:
- Narrow streets (avoids traffic in side streets)
- No highways in the city (loud, dangerous, take up lots of space)
- Grass on both sides of sidewalk and trees on every street.
- Extremely high park density.
- Protected bike lanes everywhere.
- Side streets with random dead ends.
- Commercial streets every ~4-6 blocks that allow more traffic + bus routes.
- Rectangle structured blocks with numbers 1 direction and names the other.
> Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
NIMBYism. I would rather have 6x more houses that people can AFFORD to live than 1/6th the homes owned by the richest people in the city who _really love it._
You can design beautiful neighbourhoods that are much much denser than they are now.
Single family zoning should be abolished in this city if we have any intention of solving the housing crisis.
> Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
NIMBYism.
Name calling as an argument technique.
You can design beautiful neighbourhoods that are much much denser than they are now.
In theory. Sometimes it actually happens in reality, too.
Most of the time though, when developers and their paid servants (aka your elected representatives) get together, something rather different from this glossy vision you seem to have ends up happening. In most cases the end reuslt is not at all beautiful, and (when you actually crunch the numbers) not all that affordable, either.
Not too infrequently it devolves into outright shenanigans, with profound betrayals of trust, and huge swaths of development opportunity more or less handed out to connected donors and/or other political kingpins (in exchange for who knows what votes or other favors they have to offer).
That's how it goes, and like the Leonard Cohen song -- everybody knows.
I agree that zoning has its pros and cons. And just because we did things a certain way 50 year ago, doesn't mean we have to keep doing it that way.
But the attitude you're presented sounds (to these jaded ears) well - saccharine. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be fundamentally circumspect about the promised benefits of many (if not most) proposed zoning changes. There's no need to assume that anyone who doesn't share your own enthusiasm for such changes is (as you imply) just fundamentally self-centered - or filthy rich.
Abolishing mandatory single-unit zoning is different from saying no one can have such a unit. People should have a wide variety of housing options available based on their needs and price points.
It seems like we really should be able to make soundproof apartments today. I’m definitely not an expert but it’s hard to believe that we can’t we make thick walls with the right material between apartments.
A lot of construction and transportation seems like it’s needlessly bad due to underinvestment and old equipment. I think we can make almost noiseless EV cars like Teslas today, no-compromises high density housing, quieter construction equipment and so much more.
We definitely can. The apartment I lived in from 2018-2019 was ghostly quiet. For the first five months, I could easily have been convinced that we were the only people that lived on our floor.
Sound proofing is absolutely trivial to install and its benefits by far exceed its costs... It should be absolutely mandatory on any multi-family building.
As an avid biker in Vancouver, I can unfortunately not confirm that. There's a few strategic ones, but it's far from everywhere. https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/map-cycling-vancouver.pdf has the overview. It unfortunately doesn't cover the extended area, but already shows that outside of downtown only a small amount of fully protected lanes exists - like Arbutus Greenway.
The "local street bikeways" tend to actually be pretty good though. There are plenty of traffic diverters and other calming elements, unlike most North American cities that just paint sharrows and pray for the best.
Fully agreed. I would feel safe on most of the "green" streets on the map.
The intention was definitely not to state that overall Vancouver has a bad infrastructure - it's certainly better than average. But just to clarify that the amount of fully separated lanes is not that high.
Also it gets a bit worse in suburbs like North/West Van, New Westminster, etc.
Yeah anyone who thinks that Vancouver bike infrastructure is bad is delusional - it's not perfect but no city is (especially in north America) and you can get basically anywhere in the city on a safe side street
> Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
This is such an odd statement; it's "not even wrong."
Vancouver zones most of its land for low-density suburban houses that accommodate very few people. It also has many examples of zoning districts that accommodate a lot of people in urban neighbourhoods that people love to live in. You can just change one zoning district to another proven one!
> Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
Well, avoiding changing zoning has created areas that nobody can afford to live in, so they don't really have a choice at this point. Vancouver's affordability crisis is generally considered by economists to be the worst in North America.
Not really. If you don't build more homes, you have to limit how many people can live there. The latter is currently accomplished by money, but could be shifted to lotteries and waitlists if there was strict rent control or all housing was public. Both of those are significantly worse than just building more.
Worse for who, though? The traditional political power base of cities is homeowners, particularly those with enough wealth and free time to get involved with politics.
By owning homes, they don't care about the iniquity caused by wait lists, lotteries, or rising prices. In fact, they benefit greatly from rising prices. And if they can keep people out, they don't have to worry about change causing any discomfort to what they currently enjoy.
> In fact, they benefit greatly from rising prices.
Maybe. If they are able to sell at the peak. A house isn't a share of stock you can sell when the market is up. Typically you hold until the kids move out and you retire and then sell, so the timing is handed to you by life. If housing market is down the year you retire, bad luck.
Meanwhile all those years they are living the house instead of selling, rising prices hurt the homeowner because it means taxes go up.
As a homeowner I sure wish the estimated value never went up. I'd rather be paying the same taxes as when I bought it instead of a lot more.
Compare your financial setting from massive financial gain versus not having it: you are immeasurably better off than the person that did not own a house during the same time period. You are also immensely better off than anybody who was born later and doesn't have massive family resources for the down payment.
The rise in prices is the predictable (and desired) form of demand-side management thay results in market-based pricing of homes.
In another comment you express the desire that people should live places other than Vancouver. That rise in prices gives you both financial power and the displacement of others that you desire. I think it's wrong.
> Compare your financial setting from massive financial gain versus not having it
Again: maybe. If I'd sold in 2006 I could have made a gain. But if I'd retired in 2008 after the housing crash and had to sell while the mortgage was underwater, there would have been no gain at all.
If I sold today I could make a profit but I can't sell today because I'm not at that stage in life so it's meaningless.
I'm still relatively far from retirement so there may or may not be another large housing crash between now and then (I think there will be but I don't have a crystal ball). So nobody can predict whether the paper gains I have on home value today will exist when I retire and sell. Personally I don't care because I don't keep a house as an investment, it's a home to live in and a stable place for my child to grow up in.
> You are also immensely better off than anybody who was born later
False equivalence. I'm better off than most 25 year olds, yes. I'm also far better off than my own 25 year old self who had a net worth deep in the red. This has nothing to do with year of birth. It's about stage in life. At 25 I'd just finished school and owned nothing but debt. Now a couple decades later I have the benefit of a couple decades of savings from my career.
> In another comment you express the desire that people should live places other than Vancouver.
I have not expressed such desire. I didn't desire to not be able to live in Manhattan. Giving up that dream hurt. But pragmatically it was a wise choice. I'm better off having moved to a cheaper place and built a life here instead of staying tilting at the windmills of the Manhattan real estate market that I could never crack.
Same strategy might work for someone tilting at windmills in Vancouver today. That's not a desire, just pragmatism.
> That rise in prices gives you both financial power and the displacement of others that you desire.
I desire no such thing. You keep putting words in my mouth that I never wrote, so I won't be responding tit for tat.
Good luck explaining that nuance to everybody in the neighborhood who thinks their home value is the most important thing.
> rising prices hurt the homeowner because it means taxes go up.
That depends. Idk how other places do it, but where I live there's a fixed amount of total tax for the year and it's distributed to each home based on its value. So if all the homes in the city go up equally you're paying the same tax every year, but if your neighborhood goes up faster than others, then you're paying more.
What sort of demand side solution are you considering? Housing is a basic necessity of life. Perhaps by reducing demand you mean that instead of one family living in a single family home, demand for living space is reduced so that two families live in the same space?
It certainly is and should be a fundamental human right.
However, living in Vancouver specifically isn't a necessity. There are more affortable places.
In my 20s my dream was to live in Manhattan, I wanted it so bad. Never made it, way too expensive. Had to give up that dream. A couple decades later I still occasionally wish it could've been, but never was. I have a nice house and built a nice life elsewhere.
Not to take away from efforts to build more and affordable housing in the big cities, which is good and necessary. But want to point out that the idea that everyone can get to live in NYC/SF/Vancouver on the cheap isn't quite a realistic position to take either. Often the most pragmatic solution is to find a different city to live in.
> But want to point out that the idea that everyone can get to live in NYC/SF/Vancouver on the cheap isn't quite a realistic position to take either.
This is a common NIMBY trope: "everyone" wants to live here and that's impossible, so we shouldn't try.
It's false in that not everyone wants to live in Vancouver/NYC/SF, far from it. But, it's easy to allow everyone who wants to to live in these places. In another comment you expressed the desire to keep your place in the city, without the burden of rising property taxes that go with your massive financial gains. Why should you get that, but not somebody else? On what basis do you privilege your own basic needs over others? That's no way to run a society, saying "got mine, forget all the rest of you."
They also have view cones, which are:
"a policy enforced by the City of Vancouver that limits the heights of the buildings to protect sight lines of the North Shore mountains from a number of arbitrary perspectives"
Seems like view cones are a frequent criticism of certain pro-housing activists, but I think we can see from this Vancouver Zoning Map is the real low hanging fruit for more housing development is the vast swath of land zoned exclusively for single family homes.
Personally I can't understand the hate for the viewcones that I sometimes see. Talk with any newcomer to the city and they absolutely love the mountains. The mountain views are one of the selling points of this city. It would be utterly mad to block them.
Depends on the view cone, I think. I agree that view cones aren't public enemy number 1, but some really are bad.
I live near one in East Van that is utterly useless; it's defined as starting in the middle of a road, and the view is blocked by tree foliage most of the year anyway. And yet because of it, multiple proposed apartment buildings have been cut short.
The one from the top of Queen E Park is also weirdly low. Like you could almost double the height of the towers downtown and you still wouldn't be blocking the view of the mountain from this viewpoint, so the view is really damn odd.
That's the thing - it's the _newcomers_ who absolutely love the mountains. Everyone else are perfectly content with knowing that they exists and don't need (or want) to see them every day from their window. It's a good perk, but it's no more than that.
> Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
This implies that the current zoning was implemented for good reason. That's basically never the case. Most existing zoning was done either to increase property values or to keep out people that the elites don't want to be around.
Are you perhaps being a tad hyperbolic? Is it fair to say that the suburb layout is generally considered ideal to live in? Supply issues aside, I would argue that most people would move to a suburb rather than a dense city all other things equal.
Is there a compromise that you’d be okay with? Maybe sprinkle in some high-density apartments around to supplement the single-family housing? Maybe wipe away rental properties so that you don’t have effectively vacant units for portions of the year?
No need for inferred preference, actual preferences of where Americans would prefer to live are 19% urban, 46% suburban, and 35% rural [1]. 71% of urban residents who would like to move want to move to a suburban or rural area, in contrast, 23% and 20% of suburban and rural residents who would like to move respectively want to move to an urban area [2]. Contrary to what your blog post implies, most people have some idea of what each type of living condition is like, and they are making an educated choice.
There are cheap high-density areas and expensive low-density areas. According to your and that blogpost's logic, Silicon Valley's high housing prices in single-family neighborhoods and the fact that people want to move there are proof that people ACTUALLY want a suburban lifestyle, not an urban one.
Looking at where people live and where they want to live is a better source of their actual preferences than looking at housing prices in a handful of expensive neighborhoods and guessing what the average person wants.
Sure, as long as we also get rid of all urban growth boundaries. Be careful what you wish for, a free market city won't look like what you think it will.
They already do in many places. Toll roads exist, and the gas tax pays for almost all of the highways anyways. Transit is subsidized an order of magnitude more. A world with no subsidies looks more like suburban sprawl than a dense transit focused city.
Not even a little bit. Go read about exclusionary zoning in general or see your sibling comment's link for some reading on Vancouver specifically.
> Is it fair to say that the suburb layout is generally considered ideal to live in?
Is it considered ideal? Maybe. Is it actually ideal? No.
Aside from the huge negative impacts on pricing and equality that we've already discussed there's the environmental impact, isolation, car dependence, etc, etc.
> I would argue that most people would move to a suburb rather than a dense city all other things equal.
This is unfortunately true for Americans and I'd guess Canadians as well. I think this is due to some combination of:
- The absurd "American dream" vision that's been pushed by car manufacturers and other companies for many decades.
- Most American cities aren't actually very good, so most Americans have never experienced the alternative.
- Fox News and other conservative media pushing the narrative that cities are infested with criminals, terrorists, etc.
> Maybe sprinkle in some high-density apartments around to supplement the single-family housing?
Great. This is what would happen if there wasn't zoning.
> > Is it fair to say that the suburb layout is generally considered ideal to live in?
> Is it considered ideal? Maybe. Is it actually ideal? No.
Ideal in what? Ideal has to be measured by some metric, so which one or which ones?
What makes these discussions interminable is that some of the metrics are objective but some are subjective so there can't be any one ideal answer.
An objective measure is housing units per square km. Easy to measure, it's just math. Obviously high-rise apartment buildings maximize that metric. So is that the only metric that should ever be considered? Or the most important one?
Then there are also the subjective metrics of niceness. While many people might be happy living in those high-rises, many people won't do it.
Should the density maximizers be the only people who get a vote in these matters? If so, why is that? Why are they more special citizens than others? That sure doesn't sound fair.
Or should they get no vote? Well that's not fair either.
So clearly there can't be one ideal answer, it's compromises all the way.
Many people will have legitimate preferences that differ from yours, that in no way makes them "absurd".
> Many people will have legitimate preferences that differ from yours
If your preference means that teachers can't afford homes within city limits, emissions won't improve, infrastructure can't be sustained [1], cars are the only viable transportation, etc, etc, then your opinion should really be discarded by decision makers.
A suburb can be significantly denser than another, even just allowing duplexes or front/back lots can double or more the carrying capacity of a suburb.
It’s nice that Vancouver doesn’t have a highway cutting it in half like Seattle, but it also takes longer to drive anywhere.
From my experience, many of its neighborhoods/dining districts feel really cold/loud/unwalkable due to the high speed 4 lane roads everywhere. Traffic noise still seems like a huge issue, trying to parallel park when cars are buzzing by at 50 mph isn’t fun, and the unprotected left turns are pretty gnarly.
> many of its neighborhoods/dining districts feel really cold/loud/unwalkable due to the high speed 4 lane roads everywhere
Yeah, this is an unfortunate aspect of Vancouver's city planning; our zoning forces nearly all shops and restaurants onto busy, loud, polluted arterial roads. Changing this isn't really on the political landscape right now, and I don't think it's going to change anytime soon.
Driving is just one mode of transportation. Buses can take 3 or 4 times as much time to reach any destination, which is far too much to be a viable alternative to people with a choice.
Ask yourself if you would like to spend 45 minutes aboard the bus system as opposed to 15 min. in a car
> Ask yourself if you would like to spend 45 minutes aboard the bus system as opposed to 15 min. in a car
Ask yourself how the options would be different if cities weren't so focused on cars.
Edit: To be less vague - my choices to get to work are 20 minutes on bike basically for free, 25 minutes via metro for ~$100 a month, or 40 minutes by car for about $500 a month in tolls and parking plus thousands a year for the car itself and maintenance. There's no reason this can't be the norm in the US aside from local politicians deciding they don't want it.
Yes I acknowledged this in my previous comment. But it could be normal for every city with some pretty simple changes that no mayor is willing to make.
If a full lane is dedicated to buses instead then that bus would be much faster than the cars stuck in traffic, while moving significantly more people.
In general, I agree with you. In specific, I drive almost everywhere despite being a supporter of public transit, because I can't afford to live near a skytrain station and the 'last mile' adds an hour to a trip. If we had more buses, and most routes had dedicated lanes, sure. But since we're half-assing it all, more gridlock is just more gridlock. Which, among other things, means more pollution.
edit: compare to a city like Seattle, which has similar weather, hills, density, etc. A notable feature of the transit centers there is a Park & Ride: a place where folks can park their cars (for free, when I lived there) and get into transit. Vancouver does not have anything of the sort. If you want to park somewhere and take transit into the downtown core, there are extremely limited options. So you get too many drivers. Disincentivizing cars usage is great when there is a viable alternative -- in the absence of such an alternative, it's just flagellation for its own sake.
Sure, you're making a reasonable choice given the current reality. But it doesn't have to be that way. When I say driving should be difficult, I don't mean just make the roads worse without any other changes. I mean improve active transportation, transit, and housing density/affordability. In the short term, each improvement here will cause some pain in making driving slightly harder, but after sufficient time the other options will be good enough that nobody will miss driving.
I feel like LA and Amsterdam are both evidence that having a big highway cutting a city in half is neither necessary nor sufficient to make journeys (even car journeys) faster.
It's not immediately apparent from the street names; but the Grandview Highway and Georgia St effectively act as parts of a bifurcating through-way, albeit with a congestion nightmware between them.
Not really comparable to a highway. I mean, yes it's a wide street, but you can just walk across Georgia Street as a pedestrian. Can't do that with the sort of highways that scar the landscape of so many North American cities.
That's an interesting one to me, because I'm generally bothered by how wide Vancouver streets are. IIRC most Vancouver residential streets are 33 feet wide, waaaaaaaay wider than in many European and Asian cities.
From the other side of the pond, your list makes me sad. It appears we take a lot of urban design elements for granted here. I grew up in commie blocks, am now in Haussmannian urbanism, and most of those ( i mean there isn't grass and trees on every street, but it's pretty frequent) are just.. basic common sense here.
Like the fact that there's a term, "transit oriented development" used in North America. Here it's just common sense, nobody calls it anything.
Commie blocks in Eastern Europe and Haussmannian buildings in France.
And i didn't say those are better than Vancouver, just that OP's list about why Vancouver is better than most NA cities is common sense which can be said about most cities in Europe.
There are also a few bads, some that can be seen from the map:
- Quite a few stroads[0]: Granville around 70th, Granville around Broadway, Cambie around Broadway, 4th West of Burrard, most of Broadway, many sections of Kingsway, the section of W 41st Ave under the Kerrisdale label, and others.
- In general, getting East-West by vehicle is notably worse than North-South. While I 90% agree with your highway comment, this does make the situation frustrating at times.
- Vancouver is less bad than most of the cities that surround it, but it still has job areas a little too clustered in a few spots.
- Most land is low density in a city that has a huge housing shortage.
- Skytrain doesn't cover the majority of this map.
- Residential neighbourhoods have so much street parking that kids can't play street hockey these days. In general, there are too many cars in residential areas that kids can't play outside with the minimal supervision I had as a child.
I will add one more good:
- Grid designs tend to have a problem where local roads don't remain local roads and instead become side streets for cars. Vancouver has done a good job of using tools to keep these local roads serving just local traffic: narrow streets, tight visibility, forced turns, etc. Besides the benefit this provides to locals, it also helps with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
[0] - Stroad is a portmanteau of street and road. By trying to be both, if fails to do either. Stroads suck no matter what type of user you are:
Car perspective:
- For thru traffic they suck since they are "too busy", traffic usual goes slower than the speed limit.
- For traffic stoping at a local destination they suck because getting to your destination is difficult: the road is busy so you need to focus 110% on driving, but you also gotta find parking, places to turn around, etc. A lot of people put pressure on themselves if they block traffic while parking and that is a necessary aspect of driving to a business that is on a stroad.
- Unprotected left turns usually only allow 1 vehicle per cycle of the lights. There will be a lot of unprotected lefts happening in these areas.
- For locals they suck because your community has congested traffic all the time.
For pedestrians:
- The area is loud due to all the cars. God forbid if people start honking. And this is Vancouver. I've seen people honk at parked cars a few dozen times in the last 5 years.
- If you have to cross the street, it can be a real bother as you will have to wait for a crossing signal that may take a few minutes. When you finally get your turn, you have to deal with drivers who are desperate to make their left turn.
- Walking distances are higher than they'd otherwise be on a proper street.
For cyclists:
- Commuting: Prepare to Die Edition
For business owners:
- While the traffic does get you some amount of visibility, a lot of that traffic will simply never stop at your business. There is also a portion who won't go due to the difficulty in driving in the area.
- You probably get way more business from random people walking by than from random people driving by. The artificially high walking distances mean fewer walkers.
- You have to soundproof your facade to deal with the noise.
- Prior to the lockdown, Vancouver city council was quite against patios and balconies at businesses. These days, they are allowing more of them. These will necessarily be loud and there is nothing you can do. Customers will complain.
>- No highways in the city (loud, dangerous, take up lots of space)
Why doesn't this result in cars simply traveling on regular streets and creating noise and danger in the exact same space as pedestrians, cyclists, and residents?
If you're speaking about the part on the map that is labeled "Grandview highway", it's just a name - it is a regular street interrupted with traffic lights, bordering "The Grandview Cut" which has both train tracks and metro ("Skytrain") tracks: https://goo.gl/maps/B9dTbxg4LhedP9C7A
It doesnt cut through what most people would consider the “city” part of Vancouver which is the denser part of downtown. It’s also not really like a highway that most people refer to. It’s nothing like the 400 series in Toronto, or the I5 in Seattle.
It's interrupted in its path by the viaducts, but the highway begins again to cut through Stanley Park and cross to the North Shore.
Vancouver's not a particularly well-designed city; its lack of a fully through highway is more a circumstance of indecision than design. It's still a city hampered by office districts and bedroom communities, linked with stroads, like many North American cities.
Montreal is nice. Most people, even as far out as Outremont, have a grocery store within walking distance. Metro map could be improved but is decent for the core. Transit runs decently during peak times. Main issue is lack of bike lanes, but there's always a shortage of bixis so apparently people do cycle. Easy access to parks, I've got two within walking distance. Unfortunately the metro does stop at around 1a, so going on a downtown bar until closing means you're taking a night bus back.
There aren't any, really; because we didn't spend the 20th Century thinking of alternatives to commuting via personal automobile from bedrooms to offices.
Yes, just like with communism, to which I alluded in my comment, with urban design we also have a problem of figuring out what people want, where, and how much of it. The “urban design” people often have the similar mindset to communist planners, who knew better what people should want than the people themselves.
The 400 series highways don't go anywhere near Toronto's downtown either. The 401 skirts around Toronto's suburbs, far to the north of what anyone would consider the city.
The urban Toronto road you're probably thinking of is the Gardiner Expressway, which is owned and managed by the city itself, not the provincial government.
For decades, there have been calls to remove the elevated downtown section which cuts Toronto off from its waterfront. Something that would not only remove a source of blight and open up the development potential of some significant tracts of prime land, it would also save the city a fortune in maintenance costs!
It's also slated for removal (at least the upper viaduct), a very large park is meant to be built in its place (the architects that designed the High Line park in NYC were going to be designing the project, at least as of 3 years ago).
Yup, and coincidentally there's basically no plan whatsoever to either move offices out of downtown or significantly improve transit options into downtown.
And it's not going all the way to UBC, which is the reason why the B-line is so crowded. You stop 1/3rd of the way there and then transfer to the B-line again.
It's inevitable. It's really only a matter of time.
There's only so much money that (is politically viable) to spend on this stuff at any given moment. As soon as the line to Langley is done we're gonna see a pivot to building out to UBC or North Shore.
I have a question about cities in North America. I know you don't have many apartment buildings, the urban sprawl etc. In fact I studied a bit of urbanism so I got the gist of it (I think).
But I always wonder why don't you have more smaller supermarkets closer to where people lives, instead of larger ones that require so long trips. I guess it wouldn't make it walkable, because cities are not designed like that, but it would be a 5 minute trip maybe.
In my mind that is probably more efficient. People may come more often, so more opportunities for cross selling, real state is probably cheaper and the only downside I see is that would probably require more labor.
If I had to hop in the car for doing anything I think I'll die of laziness.
I'm not sure why this is the case, but American consumers have come to expect (have been trained to expect?) a wide variety of choice at the supermarket. I'm talking like, you want honey? You've got 50 different brands/sizes of honey available. Repeat for every expected type of product, and you need a big centralized building for this to work out economically.
Of course, all problems in NA urbanism seem to stem from land zoning. Building a small grocery store in a residential neighborhood is illegal in a distressingly huge percentage of urban land here, and it's been this way since the 50s. So that's probably part of why the megamart has succeeded. The concept of 'mixed use' is a new idea to many cities, and it's not well distributed on the zoning maps.
The why is because once you have a car, the marginal cost of using the car is only $0.40 to $0.60 per minute of travel. That means if you are running errands, it makes sense to shop at big box stores that can sell for 10%+ cheaper due to efficiencies of scale.
Hence Costco/Target/Walmart/Home Depot/Lowes/Best Buy/Staples/etc succeed over a small business that might be a walkable distance. You are already in the car going to and from work, what difference does a detour make.
You make a solid point, I’d only say you’re overestimating a marginal cost of a minute of travel. Unless you’re doing a long freeway trip (which is unlikely in the context of going to Target), your average speed will be closer to 30 mph. That means that you’ll burn less than 2 gallons of gas (closer to 1 in fact) per hour, and even at today’s gas prices, that will come down to less than $.15/minute. Maintenance and amortization, as a good rule of thumb, are around equal to the cost of fuel, so you’re unlikely to reach $.40/minute, much less $.60, unless you drive expensive, fuel inefficient car at highway speeds for extended periods.
The rest of your comment, however, I fully agree with.
> The standard mileage rate for business use is based on an annual study of the fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile.
I also incorporate morbidity/mortality risks associated with driving, considering it is the riskiest thing people do on a day to day basis which very well could result in loss of income due to not being able to work and other costs.
I also expect inflation to keep driving up replacement cost of cars (and repairs).
Finally, I am under the impression that short distance start and stop driving is more costly via wear and tear than long distance highway driving.
I think they’re overestimating, but more importantly, they also include fixed costs in those figures, while the parent comment was talking about cost of a marginal minute once you already have a car.
I presume that a car would have to be replaced after it is no longer useful, so the replacement cost needs to be amortized over all the miles in the current car.
I think consumers really do make this choice, and aren't very compromising. People have a high expectation for both the variety of products, and the variety of a single product.
As a result, the different people have very diverse diets, and it is unlikely that a small store would satisfy most of them.
For example, each week I shop from 2-3 different supermarkets that are 60k ft^2 each (6k m^2).
And an individual consumer probably doesn't take advantage of all the choices on a weekly basis but in aggregate they do. I have a couple of convenient supermarkets and I don't shop at both weekly but I recognize that each is better for certain things. And Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are even better for others although neither are close enough to make a special trip for the most part.
See, hopping in a car to do everything is sort of the modus operandi in the Americas and something I absolutely can't stand. The east coast cities are spared somewhat from this by virtue of being older with more entrenched infrastructure that predates cars but west coast cities are often oriented around cars as the primary method of transportation. Vancouver is one of the better of these but it still suffers greatly from a constant flow of traffic through the downtown core.
> The east coast cities are spared somewhat from this by virtue of being older
Note that <100 years ago basically every US city had somewhat similar density to New York or Boston. It’s not that they were built for the car so much as they were rebuilt for it. So I don’t think the reason can be as simple as ‘because they’re older’.
In Vancouver, you'll usually have a few grocery stores in <10min walk because of the zoning. Commercial is usually every 4-6 blocks. It takes 10 mins to walk 4 blocks, as they are small in comparison to other cities I've lived in.
Most American cities were designed to do everything by car.
Vancouver is also notable for having mostly resisted the "urban interstate highway addiction" that incentivizes longer (distance) car trips in a lot of American cities.
Going to Toronto and seeing their highway along the water makes me sick. I can't believe they are cool with that. Boston at least realized their mistake and reversed it.
The city amalgamated with near inner-suburbs, which gave a lot of power to city councillors that are living in more car-centric neighborhood. So while people downtown couldn't give two shit about the highway and would like it destroyed, suburbans councillors voted to keep it because of course, that's the highway they use to drive to city hall. There was a decent plan to transform it into an urban boulevard (still large, but less ugly than elevated highway) and that lost.
And before anyone mentions people going to work that need the highway, majority of commuting to downtown business is not cars, but a combo of transit + cycling + walking.
Thank you Tip O'Neill.[1] It's nice to get the rest of the country to pay for your urban planning mistakes. The Big Dig was sort of awful to live through. But getting rid of the elevated highway that cut off the North End was a huge win for Boston.
The eternal sadness is that in part due to that reliance on federal money, we were unable to put real rail infrastructure in as part of the project and could only get Bus-'Rapid'-Transit which led to the mediocre Silver Line.
In some parallel universe Boston is yukking it up with a high frequency train from Roxbury to the South End (along the original elevated Orange line route) to South Station to Seaport to the Airport and I hate them for it. I just know they demolished Central Parking at Logan and built a gleaming rail terminal in its place.
Yeah, the mediocre Silver Line (which has only become a more obvious "compromise" as the Seaport area has developed). As I understand it, there was also "supposed" to be a new better connection between North Station and South Station which never happened.
Though I shouldn't complain too much. Not that I go into the city a lot but the public transit system, including commuter rail, is pretty good by US standards overall for all its problems.
And parking at Logan is such a mess that I just get driven, expensive as it is. Even economy parking is expensive and it's practically in another state.
>But I always wonder why don't you have more smaller supermarkets closer to where people lives, instead of larger ones that require so long trips.
It's a reasonable question but I don't really know the answer.
In the US you tend to have sort of a bifurcation between (a few) supermarket chains (possibly somewhat downscaled in an urban environment) and convenience stores/bodegas/small food departments in places like urban Targets that tend to have minimal produce etc. Whereas in someplace like London, you're have Tesco's and smaller Sainsbury's which are somewhat in-between. Certainly there are exceptions with various local markets/specialists but that's the general pattern one sees.
I hate this about Vancouver and North America. Even if you are lucky enough to live near grocery store, the way the city is designed drains your soul as you walk. There are no beautiful buildings, wide sidewalks, or points of interest along the way. Just cars zooming by loudly, bumpy sidewalks or gravel, or large stretches of the back fences of single family homes.
You have to live in rather remote place in US to not have a supermarket within 10 minute drive. There are plenty of places like that, to be sure, but in the suburbia you’re thinking of, large supermarkets are typically within 5-10 minutes drive.
For example, I live in Seattle, in a single family house in a single family house neighborhood. I have 3 large supermarkets within 5 minute drives, and at least 6 within 10 minutes.
Given that, why would I want to go to a store that has smaller selection and higher prices, if I can get to a proper one in 5 minutes?
I do think 5-10 minutes by car is really bad benchmark, but I think a lot of people do feel like that's tenable.
I've lived most of my life in places that are 5-10 minutes by car from a store, and it makes for a very isolated social experience, but also it means that if I don't have a car, getting groceries is a planned 1.5 hour experience.
Now that I'm living within walking distance, I buy a majority of my food multiple times per week, only for a few days at a time, which means I can also go to the coffee shop and see people doing the same thing, have a talk with them, socialize etc..
I used to live in a canadian suburb and the reasons I heard the most often to opposecommercial development near their houses were that they didn't want additional traffic, loud trucks making late night deliveries or people parking on their street. Basically making it impossible to rezone residential or vacant lots as commerces.
I'm close to Vancouver right now and I'm happy to see the local source of drunks, the old government liquor store, is now a small grocery store with a lot of really high quality stuff in it. I got some pretty good steaks for a decent price in there.
It's generally a bit more expensive than the larger one that was already in the area but damn is it nice. I've noticed this in a bunch of other neighborhoods, too. They have stuff like European import candies and stuff. They didn't exist about a decade ago when I was living here last.
I think that depends on where you choose to live. To give the ideal case scenario, in a city like Atlanta which has sprawl, you can choose to live close to midtown/downtown, and you'll get that proximity. You can also live further away and drive. This is far more sustainable in terms of quality of life, cost of living etc., than forcing everyone to make one trade-off v/s the other. Personally, I like the choice and options that this brings, rather than shopping at an overpriced corner store or a high-end local grocery store in cities like SF.
Look I get that HN is a North American-dominated site, but you have to understand that what you just posted is sheer lunacy from the perspective of someone not from that continent.
In the UK, the trade-off you described does not exist. Unless you live in a genuine rural area, there is almost always a supermarket (or mini version of a supermarket chain) within a 10 minute walking distance of where you live. Even in suburban areas. And they aren't overpriced, I've never noticed a significant difference in pricing between the mini versions of e.g. Tesco and the big versions.
I live in the suburban outskirts of a medium-sized city, there are about half a dozen decently sized food shops in a ten minute walking radius of my house.
From what I've seen, this is purely because of zoning laws. You can't walk to buy milk in American suburbia because it's illegal to build retail in residential areas. It's that simple.
>From what I've seen, this is purely because of zoning laws.
America is vast and sparse for the most part. I don't know if such a model is even viable even if you were to relax zoning for grocery stores. Isn't the store's profitability proportional to population density ? Considering the real estate and labour costs, you would have to incentivise the grocery stores quite a bit to achieve that sort of store/ditance ratio.
America is vast and sparse, but that doesn't mean your settlements have to be, does it? Besides, there are big regions where the macro-scale density isn't that dissimilar from Europe or the UK. Coastal California and the Northeast Corridor are like this.
And yes, it would be viable. For one thing, the zoning laws are what is keeping the local population density low in the first place, so the problem is circular. There are huge tracts of land where you can only build single detached houses with minimum lot sizes. Let people build duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings. Allow for subdivisions. This gives the customer base for amenities.
(When I say this, often the first reply is: but people want single family homes! Well yes, I'm not denying they are popular, but that's no reason to mandate them. The status quo enshrines one set of people's preferences in law while forbidding all alternatives. You can't really gauge true preferences in the presence of such huge market distortions. At any rate, single family homes still exist in places without zoning to mandate them, so they are available to people who want them. And moreover, you can have single family housing without forbidding retail.)
I grew up in a suburb of a town that was dying twice over (from collapsed manufacturing and collapsed tourism, the two big employers in the old days). Most housing was semi-detached, what you call duplex housing. Within 10 minutes walking distance of my house, there were three off-licences, a Co-Op, two butchers, two pubs, a post office, a library, and a chip shop. So, lets say we halve the population density by making the houses single detached instead of semi-detached. All else equal, that would let them support about half the retail, so that would be (rounding down) one off-licence, a smaller Co-Op with a post office branch inside, one butcher, and one pub. A wealthier town would likely have even more.
So yes, it's completely workable, both in theory and from my own experience.
When I talk about this it puts me in mind of a Cold War westerner trying to explain how grocery stores work to an eastern bloc denizen. Yes, ordinary people can afford bananas!
Zoning is a kind of Soviet-style central planning mania that has somehow grown like a tumor inside the world's biggest free market democracy. It distorts markets and mindsets.
Demand: I live near small supermarkets, but many in North America choose not to. We also have to pay for the privilege (since such walkable areas are generally not cheap).
I'm not an urbanist, but my feeling is that the size of the lots and the winding paths of suburbs make the paths from any house to any shop a lot longer overall, so you end up with the need to drive to a store, which leads to parking lots and being in a main road.
In a tight grid (like where I grew in Chile), a small store can survive off the foot traffic of a few square kilometer of houses, because they're more connected and just more fit in the space.
> smaller supermarkets closer to where people lives
Back when these places existed, they were terrible leaches on poor people. High prices, almost rotten meat and produce and etc. Desperate oasises in the "food desert". Many cities had a social program to clear land to build full service groceries and box stores in transit dependent areas.
The modern versions are pricey stories for wealthy urban professionals.
It's for the obvious reasons you'd derive from what you studied, and it is absolutely soul-crushing.
However, this is less-common in the more central areas of Vancouver, at least where I live, and I could never go back. If you drop into street view and go up and down Commercial Drive, there's 5-10 grocery stores that are easy to walk to. This absolutely isn't the case in most of the suburbs though.
Probably because grocery store margins are low, and the number of employees for a small one vs a large one is pretty similar, so it's cheaper and easier for the company to build larger ones.
We do have "convenience stores" some of which are effectively very small grocery stores (produce, fresh meats, etc). But usually significantly more expensive.
Convenience stores aren't really more expensive small grocery stores. I'd challenge you to regularly pickup the ingredients for a tasty healthy dinner from a typical US 7-Eleven.
If you're lucky they may sell not quite ripe bananas at the front counter. Otherwise the healthiest is going to be cheese from the cooler, orange juice, and tortilla chips.
I don't know about other areas but where we live there are 3 grocery stores within a few mile radius. I do think this is quite common. I am in a smaller city as well, of about 250k.
My wife & I walk or bike to them quite regularly in the spring/summer/fall.
Interesting. I'm kind of shocked at how much one-family dwelling there is. I would love to see expansion to Richmond, Delta, Surrey, Burnaby, Coquitlam as there is a ton of commuting population that ingress and egress to Vancouver.
As an outsider (not from North America), I find it beyond insane how they still zone all those neighborhoods at the core of the city (short walking distance from Downtown proper) as if they were far periphery suburbs.
In my country such central neighborhoods in such a young fast-growing city would have been re-zoned to 4-story buildings a long time ago, and then rezoned again to 12-story buildings more recently. No wonder they have a "housing crisis".
Edit: And when you compare it to a transit map it becomes even more outlandish, they have "single family zones" completely surrounding major transit stations.
Vancouver used to be the city with the highest proportion of single family dwelling zoning in North America. It was the example of SFH zoning in "Zoned in the USA", a very good book on the history of zoning in North America.
Vancouver had the highest proportion of single-family house zoning in North America, and the book was really about Canada and the USA, not just the latter.
North American zoning shares a lot of the same origins in both Canada and the USA; Vancouver's first zoning code was drafted by Harland Bartholomew who did a lot of American cities' first zoning codes.
It looks like this could change soon with the city allowing “metroplexs” everywhere in city limits[1]. It’s not law yet, but the city has been doing a lot of upzoning, so we’ll see.
It's definitely, definitely not going to happen soon.
The Vancouver Plan needs to be approved, then an Official Development Plan, then neighbourhood plans, then actual rezonings. Expect 10+ years, if it happens at all; Vancouver has a very poor record with these sorts of city-wide plans. From a 1992 article I found in the archives a while back:
"no city council has ever accepted any of the half-dozen attempts at developing a city plan"
New West is perfect as it is - don't change a thing... except maybe improve the sidewalks along Columbia St. and Royal Ave. those median strips are way too thin in places.
It's far from perfect; I lived there for twenty years and only moved away last summer.
For starters: it's gone quickly downhill in the last 5 years or thereabouts because the street-level outreach services were placed within the downtown and high-density mixed use areas of the city; and so city promenades and parks have become unsafe for children and other vulnerable persons. I got tired of having to sweep the grass and sand for broken glass and needles before my kids could play; or having to explain why their favourite playground was closed/spray painted/burned down. My wife and neighbours didn't feel safe walking at night; probably because of the _numerous_ murders in the immediate neighbourhood.
But more to zoning: the Queen's Park Heritage Community is an affront to affordability and heritage both! It secures and defends the white-favored, post-war housing that was constructed in the Queen's Park area that replaced the high-density housing that existed in the area pre-war. The tenements that were there prior would never pass the heritage committee now. Good luck trying to convince Queen's Park to build anything remotely affordable.
The whole of Brow of the Hill is a low-income residential area that council, even the current self-declared progressive council, seems determined to completely ignore. It has some of the highest density of children, but parts of Brow are a half hour, or longer, walk from a public playground. There was a playground, 10y ago, but the School Board paved it over to put in parking for teachers.
Last spring, I knew it was time to leave when I was walking my kids to day care at 9am on a sunny day and I had to divert their attention _yet again_ because a man was running down the street with knife wounds. It's funny, because when I first moved to town I did so because it was cheap; and one day leaving the Columbia Sky Train station a man lunged from a bush, covered in dried blood, and asked to use my phone. I let him, thinking he'd call 911, but instead he called his friends and ordered a hit on those who tortured him.
Since then things got better, the neighbourhood cleaned up, but then they rapidly declined again because council thought it was better to embrace than resist.
The political left has somehow spun the idea of common sense policies, like being "tough on crime", as being some parochial throwback to a barbaric past, as opposed to what they are: the only sane route available to society.
Their ideas have been tested, and have utterly failed in the West Coast, yet the political left's base of support hasn't wavered. This to me shows the power of narratives (e.g. "Don't Say Gay"), where they can totally distort reality for the masses.
Despite the narratives about the folly of Republicans/"right-wing" policies, it is exactly those policies that the West Coast needs.
Just FYI both Vancouver and New West are actually in Canada and not America. It's pretty irrelevant to discuss US politics in an article on a Canadian city but it's especially unhelpful when "tough on crime" policies have been shown repeated not to fix homelessness either.
Exactly the same attitudes toward "right wing" policies exists in Canada, and you just exhibited it
>>it's especially unhelpful when "tough on crime" policies have been shown repeated not to fix homelessness either.
Where has it has been shown? Singapore and Tokyo are extremely tough on crime, as any sanely governed society is, and probably spend much less on a per capita basis than Vancouver on social services. Certainly no more. These cities have very little visible homelessness and open drug use, and are extremely safe in comparison, especially with regard to street disorder, property crime, etc.
Limiting the comparison to Canada and the US: Republican-run cities have far less visible homelessness, open drug use, and street disorder than cities run by Democrats, or in Canada, the NDP/Liberals. The contrast is even more stark when you compare places in North America with very left-wing attitudes toward drug use, homelessness and petty crime, like the West Coast, to regions of North America with more traditional attitudes, like Texas or Florida.
Left wing policies in general are wholly ineffective, as evidenced by the fact that there is a huge migration of people from New York stare and California, to Florida and Texas:
In Canada, BC has the most natural advantages of any region of Canada, and managed to have negative inter-provincial migration during the 1990s when governed by the public-sector-unions/NDP.
And people wonder why real estate prices and rent are through the roof in these cities. If you replace all that SFH zoning with 6 floor apartment complexes density instantly goes up something like 10x. If you build like China with 50 floor towers then density goes up something like 100x.
To me as a foreigner living here its glaringly obvious that the affordability problem is at least in great part due to SFH zoning. I think basically anyone not native to the US or Canada immediately understands this.
I'm glad to see this topic being increasingly discussed among locals instead of just the usual boogeymen (foreign investors is #1).
Sadly, every layer of every government in Canada is determined to do explore literally every other possible option before allowing homes to be built. And realistically, fixing the problem will take decades.
Years before governments come around.
Years more before they finish their endless studies and legislation and actually legalize housing.
Once housing starts getting built, it will be a knock-down battle to keep the changes. At the same time, we won't have the capacity built up yet to build it, so years more for new industrial capacity to come online - more companies, more trained personnel, more equipment.
And then even more years for the supply to finally catch up with the demand.
My oldest kid is 14 and he's either he's living in my basement until he's 40 or he's going to have to move to Texas.
As a Canadian, I think a big part of it is that elections (both federal and provincial) can often be battles for the suburbs surrounding metropolitan areas. Suburbs often end up being kingmakers (see 2015, 2019, and 2021 federal elections or BC’s 2020 election) so their priorities are often continually represented.
Sure, but you dramatically change the character of a city or neighbourhood when you upzone with that intensity. Real estate prices and rents would also come back to reality if rates go up meaningfully and foreign investment is banned without easy loopholes. But since BC (and Canada at large) have built their flywheel for growth on a giant RE ponzi scheme, we’re stuck debating supply side solutions to a fundamental demand problem.
This is a great point about trying to fix Demand side problems with a Supply solution. This is a recent paper talking about this todo with nutrition (Does access to healthy food actually make people healthier?): https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/134/4/1793/549...
Calling it a demand side problem implies you don't want more people living in desirable areas (I'm guessing you live in one of these areas?). That is blatant NIMBYism mixed with some xenophobia. When you reduce demand people are priced out by high interest rates and have to move to less desirable locations. That has real impacts. People have to commute further to their jobs. People can't get their ideal jobs, not because they're not qualified, but because they can't afford housing. That is not an ideal outcome compared to just building more supply.
Contrasting calorie consumption with the housing market is just disingenuous. One is clearly not a market and the other one clearly is. People like you are just going to have to understand that as population in North America grows cities are going to have to get denser and your lifestyle is no longer a viable one because it comes at the cost of millions of peoples' lives.
The hypothetical density instantly goes up, though actual development might take a tad longer.
Not arguing your point that this rezoning should take place, but just pointing out that housing development is a physical process and that even if Vancouver and British Columbia politicians do get their act together around land use policy, we're in a painful housing shortage hole that is going to take years to build our way out of.
Chinese apartment towers are mostly limited to around 30 stories using low skilled labor concrete construction techniques that aims to employ as much rural migrant workers as possible, India is the same. Incidentally, such 30 story apartment blocks are significant exports to the Middle East and Singapore that heavily use Indian and Chinese labor.
But I’m not sure China is a good model for North America, they have a lot of density but an even worse property bubble, many bought apartments aren’t even renovated to be rented out (so actual density is much less than the capacity of these buildings). Such speculation was exported to Vancouver as well.
Wow, it's 90% single family homes. I thought Vancouver was a Hong-Kong style concrete jungle filled with skyscrapers of vacant luxury 1 bdrm apartments owned by foreign real estate corporations.
That's just downtown and some other places that have built a lot of skyscrapers. There's an artificial scarcity of condos in part for that reason, and there's an artificial scarcity of condo buildings/higher density buildings because of the single family zoning among some other anti-density initiatives.
I wish the popup would link to the actual zoning by-law documents. I haven't read the ones for Vancouver specifically but generally they are pretty readable and interesting.
One minor bug I noticed was the popup title bar color usually matches the map zoning coloring, except for zoning district DD where the title bar color matches CD-1 instead. At first I thought I was misclicking but it is just a display issue.
For a variety of depressing reasons, the Vancouver planning department is quite reluctant to use broadly-applicable zoning districts; a lot of new development happens with new unique zoning districts that apply to one lot only.
One of the things I really like about Vancouver's architecture, which I assume is a result of zoning, is that while there are tall apartment buildings for density, they aren't all bunched close together creating narrow dark cold streets with no views. You'll have a small number of stories near the wide streets, and then a big setback before there's a 20-story tower. It all feels open and approachable as a pedestrian, but there's decent density.
This is def a direct intention of the city planners. Despite being in one of the warmest parts of Canada, it still has long dark winters due to its latitude. "Point Towers" are a way to maximize light and also to provide peak a boo views of the mountains.
I think I agree in part, but part of this that I take issue with, is that it takes what would otherwise be publicly accessible land, and rises it up off the street for people who only live in the towers. This has its own miserable effect on the streetscape, because I really don't think that people in those buildings actually use those spaces, and the land could be much more effectively used.
Yes, and it's awful; it's essentially mansion zoning (each lot is required to be massive).
The history of Shaughnessy land use is kinda interesting; it was designed to be an ultra-exclusive enclave from the start, and the province and the city have both used their powers to keep it that way.
In the first half of the 1900s, the province enacted laws mandating single-family homes only in Shaughnessy; they were particularly weird in that the Shaughnessy Heights Property Owners' Association was empowered to enforce them. In (more) recent years the City has done largely the same thing with zoning restrictions.
You also get tax breaks in shaughnessy if you have horses on your property. Not encouraging density there!
Edit: not shaughnessy. Somewhere further south - can’t remember where I was now
Probably thinking of Southlands, the technically-zoned-for-agricultural-use mansion district which includes Vancouver's only part of the provincial Agricultural Land Reserve.
It's First Shaughnessy District. Most historic area of Vancouver and has many heritage protections e.g. a. can't demolish houses built before 1940, b. every change in the exterior have to be approved by a First Shaughnessy Design Committee apart the city.
By many metrics, FDS is one of the best places in the world to have a house in, due to following reasons:
1. Big lot size: Average size Half acre (21k+ sqft). No other world class city has such sized lots in walking distance to the downtown (< 30mins walk, <10min drive).
2. Incredibly safe.
3. Right next to the Granville shop area which is even closer than the downtown (< 10 mins walk). Major develpment happening in nearby Broadway area.
4. 15mins drive to Vancouver International airport.
5. Incredibly safe.
6. 10mins drive to beach
7. 30-40mins drive to skiing. While Vanvouer itself gets snowed in maybe 10 days an year.
8. Other benefits which apply to Vancouver due to being centrally located in Vancouver.
The problem with this is that by design, it's a nice place for very few people. Zoning central land for houses on massive lots is effectively a cap on how many people can live there; it's an incredibly regressive policy that benefits a few owners of $10M+ homes at a large cost.
Agreed. Still doesn't take away the other unique features away. I am yet to find any more place with such size houses which are walkable. Which was the charm for me.
Well, if you've made that kind of money, I guess I can't necessarily blame you, but on the other hand it's an absolutely repulsive level of wealth and opulence that would make a lot of people pretty uneasy
That's actually also true of all the yellow and orange bits, and most of the other bits as well. In the yellow zone, you can live there without having millions in a mortage, but you likely won't be able to buy anything for less
In addition, you can't build anything that's so tall it would block people's view of the mountain backdrop ( https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/protecting-va... ). Vancouver has it's priorities straight, and it's more important to have scenic views from existing housing, than building new housing
Ah darn - it isn't extended out to Surrey and Richmond - a lot of areas east of the city itself are extremely livable due to highly opinionated zoning decisions.
Zoning decides so much of the vibe of a city/neighbourhood. Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
Having lived in 6 other cities, other things Vancouver does well that aren't obvious on this map:
- Narrow streets (avoids traffic in side streets)
- No highways in the city (loud, dangerous, take up lots of space)
- Grass on both sides of sidewalk and trees on every street.
- Extremely high park density.
- Protected bike lanes everywhere.
- Side streets with random dead ends.
- Commercial streets every ~4-6 blocks that allow more traffic + bus routes.
- Rectangle structured blocks with numbers 1 direction and names the other.