Bertie Wooster
New Member
If taken purely from the perspective of transit, then I suppose you have a point, but then with just over 1 million souls in the greater city, how could you expect Vancouver to have an amazing transit system? This is also a city that has no highways to speak of either.
Actually, Greater Vancouver has just over 2 million souls. While the City of Vancouver doesn't have highways the GVRD most certainly does! What is Highway 1 coming into the region?
On the transit side, Calgary, a city of half the population of Greater Vancouver has an LRT system that has more riders than Vancouver's skytrain. While Vancouver is more compact than Calgary, it proves that residential density alone does not contribute to high transit ridership (although Calgary is aggressively pursuing and building TODs on its LRT system). Calgary, which has the least employment sprawl of any city in Canada) is able to have high ridership because of its concentrated downtown while lots of employment in Vancouver has fled to places like Richmond and Burnaby. Even though Vancouver is not a big head office city, I think it should try and cultivate more employment in its downtown ins some form.
On the other hand, Vancouver offers its own unique brand of urbanism that, whether many people outside of it may not like, people there unquestionably love it. To each their own.