Protective Barriers for Dogs, but not for Cyclists

I am one of hundreds of cyclists who ride the Stanley Park causeway on a nearly daily basis, and each time I never know if it will be the last time.

The causeway, as I have blogged about before, has no official space for cyclists, rather bikes and electric scooters share the same sidewalk as pedestrians. Adding to the problem is there is no barrier separating the narrow sidewalk from vehicle traffic.This situation has led to a number of serious accidents, including fatalities, where pedestrians (of all ages) and cyclists (of all ages) have collided and ended up on the causeway, crushed by a vehicle. Pedestrians and bikers have no alternate route to get to Stanley Park and the downtown, as the Seabus is at Lonsdale Quay, and buses are only designed to take two bikes at a time. Operated by the province, the roadway is the only link from the North Shore to the city centre.

This past week another dog sailed over the side of BC place, the result of a negligent owner ignoring signs and letting his large dog wander the public space without a leash. BC place has promised it will immediately construct a barrier to ensure this does not happen again. BC place is run by the provincial government.

Does this mean dogs who are off leash in on leash areas have more rights than cyclists, motorists, and pedestrians? How come the province won’t build a protective barrier on the causeway, but will do so at BC Place?

Protectionism

Zoning is a protectionist measure, which much like trade tariffs, constrain supply and restrict the ability of the market to respond to real demand. In the case of restrictive zoning, the housing market experiences a rise in the price of houses due to limited supply, a situation that leads to a market becoming detached from the real economy, to the detriment of the city and the region as a whole.

In a normal balanced market, the supply of housing stock either rises with the corresponding demand so as to keep prices stable, or rises only slightly more than inflation. In the condo market in Vancouver, comprehensive zoning allows developers to build sufficient product to meet consumer demand so prices neither rise nor fall dramatically. This is a healthy situation, as it allows future and current homeowners to better plan their housing needs, while at the same time permitting developers to better project budgets and sales revenues. Another benefit of this zoning environment is the neighbourhood can grow and evolve, meeting the needs and representing the ethnic diversity of a dynamic city.

Sadly in the case of a market distorted by a protectionist measure such as zoning, the prices of the available product rise quickly and unpredictably, faster than real wage increases. This reduces the number of potential buyers, as they fail to save fast enough to access the single family home market. Families, professionals with large amounts of student debt, seniors with rising property tax bills are among those forced to move elsewhere for their housing needs. Over time the profile of residents in a neighbourhood begins to narrow and become ethnically uniform, where more established ethnic groups who arrived in Vancouver early and benefited from the modern real estate booms, start to dominate the single family zones of the city. This explains why the City of Vancouver is a mostly Caucasian and Chinese city, while Surrey, much newer, is more ethnically diverse and representative of the population dynamics of Greater Vancouver.

I do not advocate turning Vancouver into a giant comprehensive development zone similar to the downtown, since this would lead to utter chaos in the market and destroy the livability of the city. What I propose is that each area in the city be up zoned, meaning single family zones become duplexes, duplex zones become more comprehensive low rise, and so on. This will permit more people to live in and enjoy the City of Vancouver’s amenities and give home buyers more choices than either moving to the suburbs or living in a condo in the downtown. It must be noted that the stock of single family homes will not dry up under such a measure, rather the market will adjust their price and quantity to match the buying power of potential home owners – those who want a single family home will demolish a duplex or retain a single family home. Up zoning will also preserve the aesthetics of the city without overly crowding neighbourhoods – one can just look at the success of the duplex zones in Kitsilano, which have preserved character and tree cover while providing a lot more housing than Dunbar or Point Grey.

The time to act is now. Restrictive zoning is strangling Vancouver, it creating a socioeconomic divide that is not healthy for our economy, our city and the region as a whole.

Clean those leaves

Feeling grouchy after my soggy bike ride from yesterday. Once again I had to take the detour around Stanley Park rather than risk the Causeway because the sidewalk remains covered in piles of slippery autumn leaves. The Causeway sidewalk is supposed to be maintained by the province, but it seems to be neglecting its duties, leaving pedestrians and cyclists with limited options and still without a barrier separating them from motorized traffic.

Oh how we live in an absurd world! There is this paranoia about bike helmets, but almost no interest in building bike infrastructure than will do more to save peoples lives than a dinky helmet.

In my opinion helmet laws need to be abolished, or modified. In Tel Aviv, in order to bring in bike share, the helmet law was modified where only children under 12 are required to wear a helmet. We in North America do not seem to understand that as long as a helmet is required, people will continue to think cycling is a dangerous activity. In fact cycling is much safer than driving, the only reason it is more dangerous in North America is because our bike lanes are paint on a street.

I’d bet the amount of lives saved with helmets are more than lost by the number of people who, put off by helmets and the “danger of bike riding”, stay behind the wheel of their cars, getting fatter and suffocating on car fumes.

Forget about helmets for adults, and focus on first world bike infrastructure.

The Beautiful Ones

I have been privileged in my life time to have known almost all of them, but what makes them unique? Why are some cities so darn awful, qu’on veut juste les oublier, and others so inviting that we can’t stop going back for more.

Apart from being far away from everything, Cape Town is a magnificent city. Capetonians enjoy stunning scenery, a largely car-free urban centre, outdoor markets, patios, beaches, and unparalleled cultural diversity. I consider myself fortunate to have it permanently stamped in my passport as “place of birth”, despite all the life implications it had for myself and my family for so many years.

Rio de Janeiro was briefly home back in the early 2000’s. It was there I fell in love with urban cycling, as even back then A Cidade Maravilhosa had an impressive cycling network, which allowed one to ride from the most southern of Rio’s suburbs all the way to the city centre. It is my understanding this network has grown significantly as the centre becomes safer, though, as in Cape Town, it remains hampered by the reality of Rio de Janeiro’s large income disparities.

I spent a year there – London is an imposingly beautiful city, which is remarkable considering it is one of the most densely populated centres in the world. Driving through London is intolerably slow, with average speeds around 10 miles per hour; everything about the place is expensive, even a sandwich at M&S will set you back 4 pounds. Yet London is teeming with parks, the city has a magnificent Thames River Walk, and its transport system is remarkably clean and efficient given its age.

Barcelona has blocks and blocks of pedestrian promenades, plazas, and street patios. The beach side features one of the greatest sea walls in the world, stretching for miles between the city of Gaudi and the shimmering beaches of the Mediterranean. At sunset one can dance to music on the beaches without the complaints of residents, while at night the city is alive with street life and live music. A gem I was fortunate enough to spend time in as a student while at grad school.

Other beautiful cities populate lists of all kinds, for all sorts of reasons. Vancouver is often on those lists, which is of no surprise. Our city is blessed with an improbable combination of sea, mountains, moderate climate, and an ethnically diverse population. Vancouver is free of the poverty of Rio de Janeiro, or the slums of Cape Town, it is far from the political instability of the Mediterranean that fronts Barcelona, it is out of the spotlight that shines without pause on London, Paris, and New York. Yet our city also has its downsides. There are no pedestrian corridors in the city centre, no plazas, no bike share programs, limited bikes lanes, a small and neglected public transit system, increased income disparities between east side and west side, and an unsolvable housing crisis.

At home on a Friday night, I am also acutely aware that in Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, or Barcelona, the last thing I would be doing is sitting in front of my computer alone. Yet this is one of the realities of a city that is terrified of noisy public places and the outdoor consumption of alcohol. I have no desire to mingle in a hockey lovers ghetto on Granville Street with rowdy 20 year olds hiding whisky in their pockets, just like I have no interest in listening to a tirade of Miley Cyrus songs pouring out of the doors of many of the establishments that are supposed to represent the night life of a city convinced it is the “Most Beautiful Place on Earth”

Vancouver has many of the elements in place to be the best of great cities, hopefully we can take an eye away from the mirror to learn a bit more about the successes of our rivals, so that we too can take our urban landscape to the next level.

Gentrification: bourgeois, burgers, and burghers

This post is quite different from my previous posts; however occasionally I feel it important to explore some of the language commonly used in modern debates around urbanization and urban land policy. Words such as bourgeois, bourgeoisie, burghers, boroughs, gentrification, industrialization. All of these terms are regularly employed in the politics of urbanization; however, it is their etymology that is particularly interesting, as each of these words provides a window into the history of urbanization.

Karl Marx, and the more radical communists who followed him, railed against a class of urban inhabitants who were the financiers and entrepreneurs behind the industrial revolution in Europe, Canada, and the United States. This class or new establishment were known as the “Bourgeois” or the city “Burghers”, and they were critical to transforming Europe and North America from rural to urban societies in the 19th and 20th centuries . (1)

The word bourgeois means “inhabitants inside the city walls” and is from medieval french. (2) In medieval France they were the craftsmen and lenders who lived inside the city and served the royal court. The Bourgeoisie or burghers of 19th and 20th century Europe were neither the aristocracy nor the working and rural classes, they were the holders of land and industrial wealth who also inhabited areas inside the traditional city walls in boroughs, which adjoined the inner centres of the great cities of Europe. (3) Vienna is a classic example of this urban model, where prior to 1918, the aristocracy enjoyed almost exclusive control of the palaces and lands of the inner centre of the city. Outside of this node, in an enormous doughnut, a large bourgeoisie arose, and it was through their wealth that cities like Vienna rapidly grew under the expansive wealth of the bourgeois class. Further beyond the gentrified neighbourhoods of the bourgeois, extended the lesser boroughs, known in French as the “faubourges”, essentially meaning “outside the bourgeois”, or “outside the town walls”. (4) This enormous populace were the factory workers, cleaners, and scrubbers of the industrial age – the proletariat. These huge geographical areas extended outwards into the rural countryside, and had limited contact with the aristocracy and elite bourgeois located in the inner rings of the city. (5)

1918 changed all of this. The calamity of the Great War, which resulted in the end of Hapsburgs and many other aristocracies ushered in a new era, where the aristocracy were replaced by a new and powerful industrial class sprung out of the elite bourgeoisie. Europe underwent a great period of mixing and political instability as the world lurched from one “ism” to another. In Russia the aristocracy lost their heads, and the bourgeois were stripped of their wealth and status to become workers of the state, along with the former proletariat. In Central Europe the Nazi Holocaust slaughtered millions of urban workers through conflict and industrialized ethnic cleansing, in an attempt to create a Greater industrial Germany.

The political instability in Europe both in the 19th and 20th century lead to large numbers of German speaking peoples leaving central Europe to settle in the United States. This was a period of industrialization in German speaking Europe and the rise of German Unification, where in the 1860’s and 70’s Bismarck and the Kaisers of Prussia forced all German peoples outside of the Helvetic Confederacy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to form a single empire of ethnic Germans. (6) German immigrants to America brought their language and customs, both of which had lasting and significant impacts on all aspects of American society. Including American cuisine, which today is known for the Hamburger, or burger for short, a meaty patty whose origin can be identified to the city of Hamburg, located in modern day Germany. (7)

The name Hamburg is most likely derived from the words town and forest or pastures, essentially a town or group of inhabitants in a forest or fields; however, the etymology of Ham is not entirely clear. What is clear is that burgher has the same origin and meaning as the french word bourgeois – both are expressions of inhabitants of urban centres inside the traditional town walls. Thus the pop culture modern burger served on plates worldwide and most commonly associated with American cuisine is in fact a German word for bourgeois, the very class of people so despised by both Marx and the communists.

Today bourgeois and bourgeoisie are associated with gentrification, a word whose etymology is equally fascinating. Gentrification derives from the word gentry, which is believed to mean of “gentle origins”, or those who have accumulated their wealth through gentlemanly ways free from the sweaty toils of manual labour associated with the proletariat or the rural class. (8)

Bourgeois, burgers, burghers, boroughs, gentrification. This exercise demonstrates the importance of words and their meaning in the daily discourse of politicians, academics, developers, and community leaders. Understanding their origin helps not only comprehend the current urban environment, it also provides a context to the great events and tragedies that shaped the cities of the world.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-art

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourgeoisie

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borough

(4) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/faubourg

(5) http://www.contreligne.eu/2014/06/stefan-zweig-lete-14-le-monde-dhier-souvenirs-dun-europeen/

(6) http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/wilhelm_kaiser_ii.shtml

(7) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hamburger

(8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification

Notes: I consider Stefan Zweig to be one of the greatest biographers of modern times. For those seeking an insight into Europe from 1892 to 1941, there can be no better biography than “Le Monde d’Hier”

Room for Improvement – Better Pedestrian Public Space in Vancouver

Trees, wide side walks, a varied composition of shopfronts and residential spaces, low levels of traffic noise, good lighting, pedestrian walkways, shelter from rain in the form of tree cover, canopies, and awnings; walking distance to amenities. These are the elements that create an appealing walker’s public space.

Piazza in Konstanz, Germany

Most of Vancouver’s inner city neighbourhoods such as Kitsilano have high walkablility scores because their streets contain many of these elements, however, apart from the Westend, Vancouver’s downtown streets are a striking contrast. In the majority of cases, they are automobile thoroughfares offering limited shelter from rain or noise for pedestrians.

Typical downtown Vancouver streetscape

After spending a month travelling in central and southern Europe, I was once again reminded how walkable European cities are. They are of course this way because they were developed prior to the automobile and stitched together during the golden age of rail travel.

Europeans are accustomed to efficient train travel, connecting seamlessly from foot traffic to a metro to an intercity express. I did this several times on my travels, catching a train from Barcelona to Lyon, another from Lyon to Milan, and from there to Lake Como and the gateway to the Helvetic Confederation. Travel was easy, inexpensive, and at each destination I was greeted by yet another inviting walkable inner city playground, a sort of pedestrian and cyclist’s Disneyland, populated with water fountains, trees, and restaurant patios of all shapes and sizes.

Lyon Bike Share

Europe is not the only part of the world with this sort of infrastructure, even the centres of cities such as Melbourne, Cape Town, Tel Aviv, and Buenos Aires, where rail is almost non-existent, are a cyclist and walker’s paradise, urban oases providing respite from the noise of cars, motorbikes, and abrasive sirens.

Cape Town Gardens

Greenmarket Square, Cape Town

Confederation Square, Melbourne

And what about downtown Vancouver? Where are our piazzas, our alcohol friendly sidewalk patios, our pedestrian malls, and our central squares? Why do we fight and squabble for 20 years over a bike lane, when in most other cities this sort of infrastructure is considered normal, an essential part of urban infrastructure in much the same way as the construction of sewers, roads, and powerlines?

Buenos Aires

There is no clear answer to this question. This is the very reason why some societies are highly successful and others fail miserably, and why even with free access to near unlimited information, this divide persists. Why is Detroit not like San Francisco, or why does Norway have a sovereign wealth fund and Greece an economic crisis, or why is Ukraine a failed state, while Poland is an economic miracle?

I remain optimistic that Vancouver is connected enough to the rest of the world that eventually we will see the need for more walkable public space in our downtown core. We may live in the “Best Place on Earth”, but there is always room for improvement.

Vancouver Developing a Duplex in an RT7 Zone

As I’ve alluded to on multiple occasions, Vancouver suffers from a housing crisis of sorts, not uncommon to many desirable cities around the world. I am not as instructed on the complexities of cities such as Paris, Rome, or Barcelona, which are part of Europe’s “museum” cities – city centres devoid of permanent residents and almost entirely inhabited by tourists, or San Francisco, New York, or Hong Kong – city centres occupied by the creative and entrepreneurial classes, where everyone else lives on the periphery, or for that matter London (arguably the most exclusive of them all). Vancouver’s housing crisis is different to these cities because it is neither a museum city, nor is it a global alpha city with a large creative and entrepreneurial class.

In Vancouver the problem is the juxtaposition of zoning and the BANANA (1), as is evident in my employer’s most recent property development project. In the past our company has always built and renovated in North and West Vancouver, nearby upper middle class suburbs with a mixture of density and suburban development, with pockets of early 20th century Queen Anne and Edwardian period homes. Zoning in these suburbs, as well as community amiability to development has enabled the North Shore to develop some very successful mixed neighbourhoods. Despite this, I decided to make a strategic shift towards the City of Vancouver because of a better values fit – cycling, bike lanes, public transit, pre-automobile city grids – all sadly lacking in the suburbs of North and West Vancouver.

I digress, back to zoning and the BANANA. The City of Vancouver’s zoning is approximately 80% single family or commercial and condominium development, with the remainder open to duplex and other smaller medium density projects. For those not familiar with the City of Vancouver, I like to call these zones places where one can build the kinds of medium density flats and town houses typically seen in the inner cities of Chicago, Boston, London, Montreal, and Toronto – not more than 5 stories high, and everyone has street access without an elevator.

Since these zones cover such a tiny area of the city, the prices are exorbitantly high, which means developers have to charge top dollar on completed product in order to cover costs and turn a profit for the next project. In my blog I have repeatedly called from the end to single family zoning, so I’ll avoid dwelling on it here. More importantly, this is where the BANANA part of the problem comes into the equation. Residents in these zones often fight back on proposed new density, as they do not want to see their neighbourhoods undergo any significant change. They argue schools will become too crowded, street parking more scarce, libraries overused, and privacy diminished. Yet what the BANANAs fail to understand, is that the very density they fight is the density that allowed them to get into the neighbourhood in the first place. Put simply, if houses could not be converted into duplexes, triplexes, and small apartments, no one other than high income earners and those with rich parents would be able to live in these zones. One only need look at the pricing in the single family zones to see the evidence. Density brings the price per square foot down, which allows more people access to housing.

So the developer has to bend to the demands of BANANAs, who through lobbying impose all sorts of restrictions on the sorts of development that can be done in these limited medium density zones. These restrictions are reflected in the City of Vancouver’s building legislation, where blanket restrictions on demolitions force builders to restore homes of questionable heritage value, often sacrificing both housing density and neighbourhood restoration.

I am currently going through this very situation at the moment. The architect we’ve engaged has been told by city hall that the house we are planning to convert is stamped as heritage, so to demolish it would mean we would sacrifice 850 square feet of living space. Agreed, the house was built in the 1920’s; however, it has suffered from so many “renovations” inflicted on it prior to the zoning restrictions, that today it nothing more than a neglected cement block with aluminium widows, a car port addition, and a concrete front stairway.

Yet the legislation is clear, the city, directed by voters and lobbying, placed blanket measures to encourage housing retention and discourage the development of the horrid MacMansions that were built during the 1980’s and 1990’s, when waves of Chinese immigrants fled Hong Kong and Macau to park their money offshore in giant pink stucco homes devoid of any garden space. The pushback from local residents was reasonable at the time; however, the city now faces a housing challenge that can only be resolved by relaxing zoning and standing up to the BANANA.

A more practical solution to fit today’s needs would be to offer the developer the option to demolish the unit and retain the allowable building space, if they integrated a minimum amount of salvaged heritage material. This salvaged material can come from other homes or from secondary resale markets. Square feet could be rewarded to the developer for installing restored timber beams, salvaged lighting, hardwood flooring, gables, stained windows, etc. Naturally even more square feet would be given to developers who retain the house; however, at least this more versatile option would ensure heritage is retained in the neighbourhood, but not by just “saving” a building that has lost all the “heritage” value it had, apart from the year it was originally built in.

For us the next step is negotiations with city. There is a four month backlog at City Hall, so this project has a long way to go before breaking ground.

 (1) BANANA – An acronym for Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything, also known as the NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY

On a road to nowhere: regional comprehensive transit stuck in traffic.

“Bike to Work Week”, how about just calling it “Bike to Work”? It borders on the absurd the amount of public awareness pushed during bike week, asking motorists to share the road with bicycles. What about the other 51 weeks? Does this mean next week motorists can stop sharing the road again? Indeed how is it even possible for a stressed out motorist looking at their phone to ever be able to share the road with anyone else?

Gripes aside, “Bike to Work Week” is a path in the right direction; however, the real battle is for a “third way” of entirely separated independent cycling infrastructure, integrated into a comprehensive regional transit initiative. Forgetting the fluff, this requires serious political leadership from senior levels of government, and not small cobbled together networks assembled by budget strapped city level governments.

Unfortunately there is little evidence of any initiatives from senior government. The premier of British Columbia is in perpetual campaign mode, having grinded long term transit work to a halt in the Lower Mainland, with the uncertainty of a transit referendum she has imposed, but which she refuses to take a stand on. Why is it that comprehensive transit has to go through a regional referendum, but a 3 billion dollar bridge over the Fraser River can pass without a single public consultation. If one is to be consistent, should the bridge not be part of this regional transit referendum? If there is no need for a referendum on the bridge, then why is there a need for a referendum on regional transit? In fact why is there a need for a referendum at all? After all, the Liberals won a clear mandate in the last election, so why not get on with the business of governing? Unfortunately the Premier and the BC Liberal Government seem to have lost the meaning of government. To govern is to lead, which means taking a stand that may not always win votes or assure reelection. Yet the blame does not entirely rest on the shoulders of the BC Liberals, it also falls on the opposition who fail to offer a viable alternative to the current governing party.

The federal government is not much better. Despite governing in a time with the lowest interests rates in history, the Federal Government has illogically taken to cutting taxes and spending, and consequently miss out on an opportunity to finance the modernization of the country’s urban infrastructure at near zero interest rates. The federal government should be taking the initiative to push more funding to local governments to pay for comprehensive transit infrastructure. Infrastructure to get people off highways and out of cars, and onto transit and bicycles. It seems not a day goes by without yet another story of a traffic jam, a cyclist or pedestrian hit by a motorist, a delayed overcrowded bus or trolley car service. Canadians spend too much time sitting in traffic and this is only going to get worse before it gets better. Canada is failing in a global economy where the difference between winners and losers is increasingly dependent on high quality infrastructure. The time is now for leadership from senior government, leadership willing to take risks to build a new society that breaks with the old.

In Vancouver, hats of to the city government for getting  “Bike to Work Week” moving, but sadly the effort is futile without getting the Provincial and the Federal levels of government on board. Vancouver and other cities in Canada will remain stuck in traffic on a road to nowhere, as long as there is no comprehensive transit plan with real dollars. An intolerable situation for a country where over 80% of the population lives in cities.

bike to work week, british columbia, harper, infrastructure funding, transit, transit referendum, vancouver

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/torys-transit-plan-rejects-drl-lrt-in-favour-of-surface-rail/article18864900/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/liberals-to-push-ahead-with-legislation-for-vancouver-area-transit-referendum/article16469783/
http://rabble.ca/news/2012/11/harper-clashes-transit-climate-crisis-deepends

 

Vancouver and Beyond

How the online world has changed since I abandoned Livejournal so many years ago. Long format blogging has gone the way of the fax machine, replaced by facebook, twitter, and sms sound bites. Unless one is blogging for a living, using it as a medium to drive content, direct eyeballs, push advertising revenue, SEO, there really is not much interest for the medium anymore.

My motives for writing are different these days. I’m a lot older than I was when I first started on Livejournal, a challenging time in my life when blogging was an outlet for seemingly insurmountable problems. It has been over a decade since I started blogging – nowadays my interests have morphed from finding a career and a place for myself in this world, to developing what were hobbies and interests into lifetime projects – to make a meaningful life, rather than a empty one. This blog will be a reflection of that, a place to post about things of interest me – Vancouver and beyond.

I have been fortunate. At 40 years of age I’ve been able to travel extensively, living in 7 or so cities on 7 continents, visiting over 50 countries, and blessed with an ability to speak 5 languages along with a further 3 or 4 at a more basic level. Financially I succeeded in navigating the 1997 Asian Economic Crisis, the fallout of September 2001, and the 2008 Great Recession. I have established myself in a beautiful city that for the most part is compatible with my values and beliefs. Gay and Jewish, I am lucky to live in Canada in 2014 and not in Germany in 1944, or Uganda or Russia in the present. I love good music, and am fortunate to be able to play some with my own two hands.

By chance and through foresight I live in Vancouver, a stunning urban blend of Asia, Europe, and North America on the shores of Salish Sea, surrounded by the Cascade mountains and neighbouring the fairest of all American States: Washington.

Vancouver is not without problems, it carries the scars of the automobile, the marks of poor zoning, and is hobbled by limited access to tax revenues that is sadly typical in a country where cities are home to 90% of the population. Barely 140 years old, what was once a logging outpost has morphed into a city of glass and trees with nearly 3 million inhabitants, and another million more expected to arrive in the next 20 years. With such remarkable growth comes conflict, as newcomers jostle for space in a city that by North American standards is already “too full” or “too crowded”. Never a day goes by without a vociferous battle being waged by battalions of NIMBy’s and BANANA’s, who seek to ensure no density and change happens in their neighbourhood.

Yet densification is happening, whether it is the replacement of roadways with bike lanes, the growing numbers of crowded buses, the demolition of single family homes replaced with multifamily units. Indeed if Vancouver is to grow to 4 million in the next 20 years, there is no way that all these people can live in far flung disturbias (suburban blights), forced to commute by bus or sit for hours on congested highways to go work for the fortunate few whose parents and grandparents arrived here in the ’50 and 60’s, allowing their offspring to fall into wealth. Density is the only way to go, the question is, “what kind of density?”

Cape Town

I was born in South Africa, and while Vancouver is definitely home for me, there is no doubt Cape Town is still the most visually stunning city in the world. I’ve lived in Rio, studied in Barcelona, travelled to Hong Kong, and visited San Francisco, but all of them are just not as beautiful as the Cape.

Here is neat video of how Cape Town’s transit system operates. It has no LRT or subway, rather they use a system of separated bus ways. The bus ways enter into enclosed stations with boarding platforms. To enter the stations, one has to tap in with a MiCiti smart card. When leaving the station one has to tap out. The stations are secure and monitored by CCTV. Out on the road, passengers board at designated bus stops and must tap in on a tap in pad, and tap out on a tap out pad. Riders pay according to distance travelled – travel farther, pay more; travel less, pay less.

How simple it is! And oh yes, Cape Town is also working on a bike share program. So why so much hassle here in Vancouver?