With the celebratory light being shined on our hometown, we feel it is important to put its successes into a larger context, and recognize there is still a great deal of work left to be done.

The City of Vancouver, for example, is just a single 115-square kilometre municipality of 600,000 residents in a sprawling, 2,877-square kilometre region of 23 local authorities and over 2.5 million people. The impressive statistics quoted earlier only include trips beginning and ending within city limits, and exclude the hundreds of thousands of cars passing in and out of our city on a daily basis. These vehicles are not travelling on elevated highways, but on residential streets retrofitted into at-grade arterials that bisect our communities, shifting the resulting externalities from the suburbs into the city.

Furthermore, with practically all of the City’s energy focused on the downtown peninsula, it appears many other areas, arguably the ones most in need – due not only to higher cycling numbers, but also lower incomes – are being left out in the cold.

These mounting problems are exacerbated by a provincial government that continues to chronically underfund public transit, while blowing billions on road widenings, bridges, tunnels, and interchanges that encourage exurban development, and undermine the legacy of past decision-makers (a legacy we’ll be exploring in our upcoming podcast series, due in early 2017).

There are signs Vancouver’s leadership is rubbing off on its neighbours, with progressive mayors such as Jonathan Cote and Greg Moore leading the charge; but without a change at the higher levels of government, it remains difficult to see how this region changes its course. As one BC Ministry of Transportation staffer famously declared to a group of Metro agencies a few years ago: “You may think you’re building Vienna. We’re building Houston.”

Let’s Build Cities With Mobility Prosperity