I’ve been travelling.

Travel comes with two perspectives. There’s the new one the road offers in front of you, and the old one of home receding in your rear view mirror.

Here’s what I learned about Vancouver by leaving it:

1. The studies that insist Metro Vancouver has among the worst traffic congestion in North America have led me to believe they are either based on some weird algorithm that has nothing to do with real-life experience, or they’re a cruel April Fool’s joke. Had the authors ever driven in Toronto, where outlying commuters start their day 150 km from downtown? Had they braved the New Jersey turnpike, where traffic volumes would make drivers here quiver? In Queens, a trip that the GPS assured me would take 19 minutes took an hour and 40 minutes. It was, I was told by the guy at the car rental return, the usual state of affairs, not a rush-hour aberration. Drivers there drove with a nonchalant territorial aggression that left my sphincter muscles in permanent clench.

As for the traffic in Metro Vancouver we so love to moan about as being intolerable?

Pfft.

2. Globalism has burdened the world’s affluent cities with a weary retail sameness. Fifth Avenue, the Champs Elysee, Yonge Street, or, for that matter, on a much more modest scale, Robson Street are all interchangeable in terms of the shopping experience. My wife and I kept wondering: Why have we travelled halfway around the world to see the same goods in the same stores? We can do the same at home, or online.

My children and their spouses, however, with whom we travelled this time, ignored the franchises and sought out the idiosyncratic, the independents, the flea market chic. They led us to neighbourhoods less crowded with tourists and gave us a richer experience of the cities we visited.

Vancouver could learn from this. Our municipal councils should be doing everything they can to encourage the one-of-a kind designers and artisans, to fashion a new kind of fashion here. Loosen up building codes and encourage retail enclaves in residential neighbourhoods. Give texture to the city it now lacks.

3. Speaking of texture, one only has to travel as far as Toronto to discover how dull and conservative Metro Vancouver’s architecture has become. While Metro Toronto may have vast tracts of some of the most depressing suburban neighbourhoods in the world, its downtown core boasts dozens of new buildings that not only delight the eye but challenge it.

Toronto has done a great job at repurposing its older buildings, too. We spent an afternoon browsing the historic Distillery District, a collection of brick Victorian-era distilleries now filled with one-of-a-kind shops and terrific restaurants. (The breadth and excellence of Toronto’s foodie scene will surprise many Vancouverites, too.)

Farther afield, in Brooklyn, which has worked hard to recover from its industrial past, our hotel was in a converted door factory. It was chic, comfortable and, compared to anything in Manhattan, a bargain. It managed also, somehow, to retain its industrial flavour. A short drive away was a huge bowling alley housed in a former iron works; it offered live entertainment and a food and drink selection that would take years to exhaust. It was all delivered with a kind of imaginative ease, as if the local authorities got out of the way and let the entrepreneurs with good ideas do their thing. Vancouver could do with that kind of relaxed approach. (Speaking of relaxed, in Savannah, Ga., we were allowed to walk the streets and drink alcoholic beverages in public, as long as our drinks were in plastic cups. The whole time we were there, we didn’t see one example of unruly intoxication, including ourselves.)

4. Our supposedly most expensive real estate in the world?