Quote:
Originally Posted by lio45
I would say the true criterion is a desire to have the shortest and cheapest possible commute to everything -- including obviously the jobs -- that the downtown has to offer.
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Yeah, I think this is underappreciated, or at least a lot of people don't seem to think clearly about it. Land is desirable only if it has good access to the amenities people expect and that is completely dependent on what transportation options are available.
A lot of Canadian cities are actually getting harder to travel around in by car, and transit is slow to improve, so people are piling into the few pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods that survived the 1950's-90's and are paying more and more of a premium to live in inner suburbs.
Vancouver has a really bad transportation network in the sense that travel around the city is slow. If you need to travel right along one of the few SkyTrain lines then it's okay (well, not at night when the system is shut down), but only a few trips are like that (~20% of commuters). A lot of people have to rely on cars and travel by car is extremely slow; probably a lot worse than it was back in, say, 1950.
My average travel speed while commuting is around 20 km/h and I live and work right next to rapid transit stations. I cross maybe 1/3 of the built up part of the metro area to get to work, around 15 km. Even within Vancouver travel's pretty slow. Yesterday it took 45 minutes to get across the city of Vancouver itself by car, from around UBC to Boundary. There's no rapid transit along most of that route and there are no highways.