Public Disorder & the Decline of Vancouver's Livability

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by Klazu

Well, of course they are cheap to build, as they are all reclaimed car infrastructure! Also, those expensive highways move hundreds of times more people (and every single piece of goods being transported) than bike lanes. I don't think investment in our highways is nowhere near proportional to that, which is the problem. I wish it would be even a little closer and realistically there should be a GPS-based cycling tax to pay for all those bike lanes.

The vast majority of the streets in Vancouver were created before there were any cars. There were electric trams operating on the streets of Vancouver before there were cars here. There were thousands of bicycles on the streets of Vancouver when there were only a few hundred cars.

There is no 'right to use a car' in any particular location, and the downsides of ICE vehicles (pollution, burning fossil fuels), or all private vehicles including EVs (congestion, making service provision and goods delivery less efficient) means their continued access to every sq. m. of street space is going to continue to decline.

We still tolerate them here in most places, for now. We seem frightened to take on the changes that many other European and North American cities are already embarked on. Most of Robson Street hasn't been closed to traffic. Cars can still drive around Stanley Park. There's still large sections of street where you can occupy the space and park a vehicle for free.

Car drivers don't exclusively pay for the streets they drive on, and they don't have special 'rights' to use them. Everybody pays for street repairs through taxes, so people who neither drive or bike actually pay for them disproportionately. As we continue to densify, and add more people across the lower Mainland, and as there's no collective interest in bulldozing new, or wider streets through existing areas, the need for cleaner, more efficient use of space will continue to see private car use constrained at the expense of other modes. The good news is that if there any private parking lots left, you'll still be able to do doughnuts in the snow (if there's any snow). Although that might be considered by some to be public disorder.