@Sean #49
I expect the number of cars entering downtown Detroit has declined substantially since 1996. Doesn’t mean its a good thing.

@Sean #51
“I expect the number of cars entering downtown Detroit has declined substantially since 1996. Doesn’t mean its a good thing.”

Are you seriously trying to imply that car usage might be going down in Vancouver for the same reason it is in Detroit?! Or that the only reason that car trips could possibly decline is due to an economic slump?

In the same period as car trips into downtown declined by 12%, the number of jobs downtown increased. It’s a little hard for me to tell exactly how much from the graph, but it looks to me like it might be around 10% or so.

See: http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/stats/metrocore/index.htm

People are making different choices. In Vancouver the decline in car trips is likely due to a combination of better transit (Skytrain), more people choosing to live downtown, and (if the Livable Region Plan is succeeding) more jobs being created in the suburbs closer to where people live.

@ Richard, #17: thanks for the link! I had not seen that before and it is interesting. I’m not sure if he would have been able to pull it off, but that poll certainly shows that he had a very good chance.

Donnie,The city of Toronto’s population is based upon a number of metro amalgamations over the years.
Metro Vancouver’s population as of 2007 was 2,249,725, this only extends to the eastern border of Maple Ridge and Langley.
Now the population of the GTA is over 5 million, but that geographic cachement area is very large, some 7100+ km/2 compared to Metro Vancouver at about 2800 km/2

There are some points of comparison, Donnie_Darko. Both are developing under a canadian system, with roughly the same separation of powers. Many of the same national and multinational developers operate in both cities.

From Wikipedia these numbers (Vancouver – Toronto):

Density: 5,335 persons/km2 – 3,972 p/km2
Metro area: 2,878.52 km2 – 7,125 km2
Incorporated: 1886 – 1834
Amalgamated: n/a – 1998

Size is not everything. That early start in the construction of the citiy means that Toronto developed far more land in the pre-automobile era.

Taking into consideration that the quartier footprint measures o.5 km2 we can look at density by the quartier:

Density: 2,650/quartier – 2,000/quartier

Keeping in mind that this number is an average taken over the entire land area of each city, it is still possible to say that in each case it would be possible to double the existing population through neighbourhood intensification strategies alone. The point here would be to seek to balance the many metrics of urbanism, including access to transportation, and the resulting quality of the urban environment.

@sean 53
“Are you seriously trying to imply that car usage might be going down in Vancouver for the same reason it is in Detroit?! Or that the only reason that car trips could possibly decline is due to an economic slump? In the same period as car trips into downtown declined by 12%, the number of jobs downtown increased. It’s a little hard for me to tell exactly how much from the graph, but it looks to me like it might be around 10% or so.”

Take a closer look at those jobs created in downtown. Largely retail and hotel housekeeping. Hardly good quality jobs, and ones where the workers likely couldn’t even afford a car. Hardly a winning scenario for Vancouver.

@Ron 60: The source provided by the city counts the number of cars entering both downtown Vancouver and Vancouver as a whole throughout the entire day, and shows both are lowering. Even if people are commuting out from Vancouver they have to come home eventually, so if they’re taking the car that would show up on the stats as an increase. Instead, the overall car usage throughout the city is on the decrease, and that’s despite an increasing population. That says something pretty big.

@Everyman 61: The entire country is relying more and more on part time, retail and service jobs that don’t pay very well. I doubt the city of Vancouver, or any municipality in the region, is any exception. That said, like Sean said, please provide a source.

@Jason King, way back at #12:

Describing Toronto in typically smug West Coast fashion as a “sea of concrete” says to me that you’ve never ventured very far out of downtown T.O. Near-downtown residential nieighbourhoods like Rosedale and the Annex are just as leafy-green as Shaughnessy or Kitisilano. And farther afield, you have the Danforth, the Beaches, and the High Park area, just to name a few. Sure, Toronto has to endure being encompassed by the Gardiner, the Don Valley (which is pretty green in itself, apart from the freeway running through it) and the 401, not to mention Harbourfront, but that would be like judging Vancouver solely by the Port Mann, Kingsway, or Yaletown.

Don’t let your Evergreen Playground jingoism show quite so blatantly. Toronto, besides being an immeasurably more cultured and mature city than our beloved Parvenuver-on-the-Pacific, has much else to recommend it. And I delight in thinking of the indignant outcries and wild rounds of knee-jerking that will set off among our local loyalists.
gmgw

“Aqua Flor”—you’re smelling good. People should note his point: “This quartier [was] essentially of my own conception”.

It was that way for me growing up in one of the beach neighbourhoods of Montevideo. That 5-minute walking distance was centred on my front door, and endlessly useful. I always joke that my dentist was next door to a candy factory, both just 1 block away. A person living one block away had a slightly different experience in his “quartier”. The magic happens when we converge on common points of interest like the twice weekly street fair.

However, at Granville & 16th, Granville itself would have been your primary point of entertainment and convenience shopping, n’est-ce pas? That is a fine stretch of urban place, as is Yew & York, Kits at Cornwall, and the area of 4th Avenue when the landscape reaches the crest of the hill around the Safeway.

Nanaimo, sad to say, is our future—unless we succeed in promoting growth via intensification, the shaping of quartiers as transportation networks, islands of density, urbanity and walkable places, at regular intervals throughout the sprawl. That could save our Nanaimos and the quality of our suburban environments.

MB’s “it appears that people prefer to walk” is priceless and timeless.

However, all this number crunching about cars entering and leaving the city is besides the point.
We ran the regional demonstration project, and lest we forget, it was a stunning success.

Let’s not give up on the vision folks, Gateway or not. During the Olympics traffic dropped by something like 33% regionally. The best report was had right here on this blog when a commuter remarked that he had not seen the Port Mann with this little traffic on it since the 1960’s.

I myself experienced Broadway around Oak on a weekday morning looking and feeling almost safe and friendly, the lanes were so vacant, and the street space was so free of noise, pollution, vehicles and crowding. It was almost as if you could throw out some tables and chairs on the street, open up a sidewalk cafe, and create a couple more service industry jobs.

The transportation equation during those two Olympic weeks in February (what did VANOC do, put $1 million per day into transit?) is part of the knowledge capital we have to export. That and the walkable urbanism that transportation system can support.

Tch, tch.

Roger was part of a charrette that I lead in downtown Nanaimo, MB, sussing out precisely what you are describing. We crafted an urban walk to help people experience that superb 19th century urbanism for themselves.

While the Downtown Nanaimo Charrette spurred the city to hire its own “urban design specialist” and produce their own urban design plan, the ultimate result was to build towers right in the heart of the historic district, going as far as altering its physical structure by cutting a new street into the superb urbanism of Commercial Street.

MB you would enjoy doing “Charlie’s Walk”.

That’s what we called the urban hike we designed after we discovered all kinds of interesting detail in the original street pattern of Nanaimo. So much that it seems improbable to me that a young Deverill, probably in his 20’s, was responsible for the plan.

Historic Nanaimo is platting of the highest calibre. The streets bend and dog leg to take the slope. The width varies, the length varies, and as in Boston’s Beacon Hill, there are some blocks that are only a single building lot deep.

In both Nanaimo & Beacon Hill the result would have been the same: a human scale street, short in length, fronted by streetwall and residential front doors on one side, and garden walls and gates on the other.

Dallas Square is a gem. Seen from the bay, it perfectly occupies the center of the urban footprint. What ever building was to be placed there, for example the city hall, or even the Rattenbury court house that is located about a block further north, that building would have been a beacon on the bay.

Even Newcastle Island is a kind of Grand Jatte for the town. An Idyl situated a short ferry ride away. The dancing pavilion located there by—I believe—the CPR, and as I remember it with a wrap around verandah, was just the right idea for an urban escape.

You can go to the city archives and ask the archivist to see some of the early plans. One of them hangs on the wall. Everyone at the office is very knowledgeable and super charged.

The Land Summit (planning conference) is held in Nanaimo this year and I am pondering whether or not to submit “Charlie’s Walk” for their consideration. Walking is the only way to really appreciate good urbanism… and in the case of Nanaimo’s platting—great urbanism. I don’t think there is a place like it in Canada, save for the Quebec Citadel.

“Don’t let your Evergreen Playground jingoism show quite so blatantly. Toronto, besides being an immeasurably more cultured and mature city than our beloved Parvenuver-on-the-Pacific…”

— gmgw 66

Then again, there are times when size is an advantage. But, you also get banality in larger doses. I think Vancouver can stand on its avant garde position. We are the west coast branch office for business, but we can hold our own as far as artistic and cultural production the disadvantage notwithstanding.

Urbanistically, Vancouver platting has the rear lane. Many neighbourhoods—including Queen Street West and streets flanking Yonge north of Bloor—have blocks where the houses access parking from the front only, and the front lawns are littered with cars. Both high-end imports and the more affordable kinds.

The other problem for Toronto is the boundless (literally) potential for sprawl. Over here, you soon run into the Mountains, and its over.

[Fair warning, we are in the 70’s on this string, so this post is throwing length to the wind].

While there are many, many neighbourhoods in Toronto that are a delight, beginning with the original—Cabbage Town—there is a meanness to the urbanism that developed in the Park Lots that has gone on to pervade too much of everything else we find around. 30 senior officials were granted 100-acres each stretching from Queen Street to Bloor; platted side-by-side starting west from the Don.

The block grants measured 1/8 x 1 – 1/4 miles.

Something of the curse of the development of the West End of London carried through here in the colony. The neighbours typically turned a back on each other, and the development of the early town was higglety-pigglety. Only two park lots, as far as I have been able to determine, ever developed in concert with one another.

Then too, the fact that the streets in the original town plats and in the park lots are usually one chain, 66-feet, or 20 meters wide contributes to this sense of meanness to the Toronto’s streets. Huge buildings erect on these narrow streets, side-by-side 33-foot tall, 19th century urbanism that pays the price to kept the scale of the street.

Even the old Eaton’s centre feels narrow to me today. And the open space in the corner of Dundas and Yonge? Gone. Covered over for commercial advantage. The intersection is now host to an “all-way” crossing (we should follow suite at Granville and Georgia). Pedestrians can cross in all directions, including on the diagonal from corner to corner.

Always the problem is the urban space. Or quite simply the lack of human scale in the urban space. You get there and you feel the energy of the crowd, the vitality of the street, and it all dissipates falling away towards towers and high rises that are spaced too far apart because that is all you can do with towers and high rise.

The opening of the subway in the early 1970’s, like our Skytrain, was used as a prompt to permit residential condo towers. Given the balance between the hyper urbanism of downtown, the barren and canyon feel to most of the streets (despite high pedestrian counts), and the dimensions of Toronto sprawl (see my post #
60), it is fair to say that the experiment didn’t work.

The city and its developers would have done better to observe the proprieties of what creates vibrant urban environments, and used mass transit to make the connections between quartiers moving away from the centre. A kind of sprawl to be sure, but one that would be far less than what is there now. And an urban form that would have taken the edge off the tower too tall, the commercial strip streetwall built to feel oppressively high, and the suburban sprawl spewing just the kinds of commuter gridlock we all thought mass transit would end.

If you wish to see what an imbalanced intensification of Vancouver will look like in 50 year’s time—the tower-mad stuff we’re seeing lately—fly to Toronto.

We can do much, much better than that.

Norman, I think it’s going to be a both-and, not either-or solution. There are places where the population numbers are just not there, but providing transportation service gets people into the network so that they can use capacity in the system further down the pipe.

The second issue with “putting [any] more tracks down the middle of the streets” is that it is a sure way to tame traffic. Whether LRT, BRT or cycle lanes, taking away blacktop has one incontrovertible result: less room for cars.

Once we are providing adequate levels of transportation, then the cars we are actually taking off the street are rush hour trips, so that just takes away congestion, and does away with over-scaled rights of way that are sized to carry traffic for just two or three hours per day.

Transportation and the resulting quality of the neighbourhood environment are locked together in our efforts to create livable quartiers.