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The City That Said No to the Road

In the 1960s, Vancouver was going to get a freeway. Eight lanes, elevated, entering downtown from the east and carving straight through Strathcona, Gastown and Chinatown before turning along the waterfront. It was the standard North American plan of the era. Every city was doing it.

Vancouver's residents — many of them the people whose neighbourhoods were scheduled for demolition — fought it and won. By 1972 a new city council was in office, and the freeway was dead. Today Vancouver is the only major North American city with no freeway running into or through its downtown core.

The only physical evidence that the plan ever existed is two viaducts near False Creek, built before the project collapsed, now leading confidently from nowhere to nowhere.

What replaced the freeway was an entire philosophy of city-building that planners elsewhere now call, without irony, Vancouverism. A city so committed to not being driven through that it is regularly voted one of the most liveable places on Earth. The traffic is still terrible. Nobody has ever pretended otherwise.

The clock: Vancouver sits at 49° north, and it pays for the view. The longest day of the year runs about 16 hours 15 minutes. The shortest runs about 8 hours 10 minutes. That is an eight-hour swing between June and December — the same streets, the same coordinates, operating as two different planets six months apart.

Which makes it faintly ridiculous that Vancouver still changes its clocks twice a year. British Columbia has already legislated to stop. It is waiting for the American west coast to move first, because a province cannot sensibly abandon daylight saving while Seattle is still doing it. So Vancouver waits — in the dark, at a quarter past four in the afternoon.

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